Helmut Thielicke > Quotes

“Tell me how much you know of the sufferings of your fellow man and I will tell you how much you have loved them.”
― Helmut Thielicke

“It is also possible to say precisely why. Truth seduces us very easily into a kind of joy of possession: I have comprehended this and that, learned it, understood it. Knowledge is power. I am therefore more than the other man who does not know this and that. I have greater possibilities and also greater temptations. Anyone who deals with truth - as we theologians certainly do - succumbs all too easily to the psychology of the possessor. But love is the opposite of the will to possess. It is self-giving. It boasteth not itself, but humbleth itself.”
― Helmut Thielicke, A Little Exercise for Young Theologians

“My plea is simply this: every theological idea which makes an impression upon you must be regarded as a challenge to your faith. Do not assume as a matter of course that you believe whatever impresses you theologically and enlightens you intellectually. Otherwise suddenly you are believing no longer in Jesus Christ, but in Luther, or in one of your other theological teachers.”
― Helmut Thielicke, A Little Exercise for Young Theologians

“Speaking figuratively, the study of theology often produces overgrown youths whose internal organs have not correspondingly developed. This is a characteristic of adolescence. There is actually something like theological puberty.”
― Helmut Thielicke, A Little Exercise for Young Theologians

“If there are any among us who are at their wit’s end, they ought to try for once to put aside all their grievances and perhaps even all their petitions and simply praise God, in order to turn their hearts to the end of the ways of God, where the eternal liturgy resounds in heaven. Nothing so changes us—precisely in the darkest moments of life—as the praise of God.”
― Helmut Thielicke, Our Heavenly Father: Sermons on the Lord's prayer

“We must always compose ourselves and lay everything else aside when we begin to pray. The world, with its other gods and all its many cares and consuming desires, has become our home, and the region of prayer has become a strange and alien country. That is why it is often so hard for us to make the transition from our world to the realm of prayer. We are filled with cares, we are distracted and driven about by doubts and restraints. We stand at the bottom of the stairs, crying out from a long distance.”
― Helmut Thielicke, Our Heavenly Father: Sermons on the Lord's prayer

“Man is not valuable because he loves God. Man is valuable because God loves him.”
― Helmut Thielicke

“Here truth is employed as a means to personal triumph and at the same time as a means to kill. It produces a few years later that sort of minister who operates not to instruct but to destroy his church. And if the elders, the church, and the young people begin to groan, if they protest to the church authorities, and finally stay away from worship, this young man is still Pharisaical enough not to listen one bit.”
― Helmut Thielicke, A Little Exercise for Young Theologians

“We can praise a man only when we have seen what he accomplishes. But we must praise God in order to see what he accomplishes. And therefore we should praise him at the very moments in life when there seems to be no way out. Then we shall learn to see the way out for our own lives, simply because God is there at the end of every way and every blind alley.”
― Helmut Thielicke, Our Heavenly Father: Sermons on the Lord's prayer

“So this is the law that always operates in the life of the Christian man: The longer he lives in Christ's discipleship the greater grows his poverty and indebtedness. But the riches and abundance of his Lord also grow greater and greater and make up for all he lacks. He must decrease, but his Lord must increase. And this he does far more abundantly than all that we ask or think.”
― Helmut Thielicke, Our Heavenly Father: Sermons on the Lord's prayer

“There is no such thing as a conscience that is (quantitatively) more or less good, depending on how close I come to ethically fulfilling the Law (Mark 10:20). There is only that conscience which is either blinded by Satan or comforted by God.”
― Helmut Thielicke, Theological Ethics

“he went on strike and withdrew into the sulking corner of the religiously disappointed.”
― Helmut Thielicke, How the World Began: Sermons on the Creation Story

“It is a mistake for anyone who is just in this stage to appear before a church as a teacher. He has outgrown the naivete with which in young people’s work he might by all means have taken this part. He has not yet come to that maturity which would permit him to absorb into his own life and reproduce out of the freshness of his own personal faith the things which he imagines intellectually and which are accessible to him through reflection. We must have patience here and be able to wait. For the reasons I have mentioned I do not tolerate sermons by first-semester young theological students swaddled in their gowns. One ought to be able to keep still. During the period when the voice is changing we do not sing, and during this formative period in the life of the theological student he does not preach.”
― Helmut Thielicke, A Little Exercise for Young Theologians

“And so they easily suppose that this truce, owing to helplessness, is victory and that they have convinced the other man. But in fact, instead of winning him over, they have merely applied a kind of shock therapy — only it was never 'therapy.' They have smothered the first little flame of a man’s own spiritual life and a first shy question with the fire extinguisher of their erudition. By such performances a person can really be smothered and strangled!”
― Helmut Thielicke, A Little Exercise for Young Theologians

“But God's Word, the Word that says he is our Father, the Word that has been calling out to us men from the first day of creation: "You are mine!" - this Word endures through all the eclipses of history, it sounds above the hoofbeats of the apocalyptic horsemen, and it will still be the saving Word on God's great last day of reckoning when the Judge will come to us and, suddenly, he will turn out to be our Father.”
― Helmut Thielicke, Our Heavenly Father: Sermons on the Lord's prayer