Austin Fischer > Quotes

“The character of Jesus is the character of God. God would never do something Jesus would find morally reprehensible, so if you can’t find it in Jesus, then you really ought to think twice before you claim you’ve found it in God.”
― Austin Fischer, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed: Black Holes, Love, and a Journey in and Out of Calvinism

“Faith, doubt, humility, and confidence—this is the stuff and substance of theology at its best. Swagger, smugness, and certainty—this is the stuff and substance of ideology at its worst.”
― Austin Fischer, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed: Black Holes, Love, and a Journey In and Out of Calvinism

“I believe we best say yes to God's glory and sovereignty by saying no to Calvinism.”
― Austin Fischer, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed: Black Holes, Love, and a Journey in and Out of Calvinism

“Or could one seriously introduce the idea of a bad God, as it were by the back door, through a sort of extreme Calvinism? You could say we are fallen and depraved. We are so depraved that our ideas of goodness count for nothing; or worse than nothing—the very fact that we think something good is presumptive evidence that it is really bad. Now God has in fact—our worse fears are true—all the characteristics we regard as bad: unreasonableness, vanity, vindictiveness, injustice, cruelty. But all these blacks (as they seem to us) are really whites. It’s only our depravity that makes them look black to us. And so what? This, for all practical (and speculative) purposes, sponges God off the slate. The word good, applied to him, becomes meaningless: like abracadabra. We have no motive for obeying him. Not even fear. It is true we have his threats and promises. But why should we believe them? If cruelty is from his point of view “good,” telling lies may be “good” too. Even if they are true, what then? If his ideas of good are so very different from ours, what he calls Heaven might well be what we should call Hell, and vice-versa. Finally, if reality at its root is so meaningless to us—or, putting it the other way round, if we are such total imbeciles—what is the point of trying to think either about God or about anything else? This knot comes undone when you try to pull it tight.41”
― Austin Fischer, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed: Black Holes, Love, and a Journey In and Out of Calvinism

“There is a great distance between skepticism and confidence and an equally great distance between confidence and certainty. God helps us bridge the gap between skepticism and confidence, but he doesn’t seem particularly concerned with building us a bridge from confidence to certainty. Due”
― Austin Fischer, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed: Black Holes, Love, and a Journey In and Out of Calvinism

“the doors of hell are locked on the inside.”
― Austin Fischer, Faith in the Shadows: Finding Christ in the Midst of Doubt

“Daily Jesus challenges you to follow him up on the cross so your old self can continue to be crucified, and daily you must decide if you will do so. Daily Jesus invites you to join him on mission, reaching out to the lost and the least, and daily you must decide if you will do so.”
― Austin Fischer, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed: Black Holes, Love, and a Journey In and Out of Calvinism

“Most doubts—like most monsters—are not that scary in the daylight. Most Christians can deal with inevitable doubts as long as there is room for doubt. But when a system is enforced that leaves no room for doubt, benign uncertainties can mutate into faith-destroying monsters.”
― Austin Fischer, Faith in the Shadows: Finding Christ in the Midst of Doubt

“The God of Romans 9–11 finds ways to show mercy, even when the facts clamor for judgment. This doesn’t sound much like Calvinism to me, but it does sound a whole lot like Jesus.”
― Austin Fischer, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed: Black Holes, Love, and a Journey in and Out of Calvinism

“I’m not sure anything tells us more about who God is than the great Christological hymn of Philippians 2: Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men . . . He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”
― Austin Fischer, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed: Black Holes, Love, and a Journey In and Out of Calvinism

“People don’t choose Calvinism or free-will theism because one side has clearly proven itself right, but because they “find one set of mysteries easier to live with than the other.”
― Austin Fischer, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed: Black Holes, Love, and a Journey In and Out of Calvinism

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”
― Austin Fischer, Faith in the Shadows: Finding Christ in the Midst of Doubt

“You need to know where people are and what they can handle; otherwise, you might shine too much well-intentioned light in their eyes and they will leave blinded instead of enlightened.”
― Austin Fischer, Faith in the Shadows: Finding Christ in the Midst of Doubt

“And this brings us back to Karl Barth. Towards the end of his life, he made his one and only trip to America, lecturing at Princeton Theological Seminary and the University of Chicago. Legend has it that at some point Barth was asked to summarize the meaning of the millions of words he had written. He thought for a moment and then said: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”
― Austin Fischer, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed: Black Holes, Love, and a Journey In and Out of Calvinism

“An illustration borrowed from Roger Olson might be helpful here. A man has fallen into a pit, is unconscious, and will eventually die. But God calls out to the man and offers help, awakening him from his unconsciousness. God starts pouring water down into the pit and tells the man that if he will just stay still, he can float on the water up to rescue. All the man has to do is not struggle or try to hold on to the bottom. All he has to do to be saved is surrender.117 His “contribution” to his salvation is the contribution of doing nothing.”
― Austin Fischer, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed: Black Holes, Love, and a Journey In and Out of Calvinism

“I’ve had moments and long seasons of living without Christ, and this is what I’ve learned: my life is more beautiful with Christ than it is without him.”
― Austin Fischer, Faith in the Shadows: Finding Christ in the Midst of Doubt

“God is always sovereign, but that means he—and not we—gets to decide what shape that sovereignty takes. And apparently, God’s sovereignty makes room for human freedom so that God and humans can have a personal, and not merely causal, relationship”
― Austin Fischer, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed: Black Holes, Love, and a Journey In and Out of Calvinism

“The paradoxical crisis of evil is that it makes us wonder both if we can live with God and if we can live without God.”
― Austin Fischer, Faith in the Shadows: Finding Christ in the Midst of Doubt

“Reason is the slave of desire.”
― Austin Fischer, Faith in the Shadows: Finding Christ in the Midst of Doubt

“Furthermore, if God has determined everything, hasn’t God also determined the sins that he is going to send people to hell forever for? Hasn’t God made sure that people will commit the sins he will then judge them for? If so, how is that just? And then there’s the question that pulls together these issues of love and justice: how is God good? If—before the creation of a single human being—God chose to send people to hell for sins he ordained they would commit, how is he good?”
― Austin Fischer, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed: Black Holes, Love, and a Journey In and Out of Calvinism

“Peter sinks when he tries to explain a mystery instead of live it.”
― Austin Fischer, Faith in the Shadows: Finding Christ in the Midst of Doubt

“is easy, particularly if home has been a place of abuse or neglect. But oftentimes leaving home is difficult, especially if home has been a good place. Of course that is what home is meant to be: a good place, a place”
― Austin Fischer, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed: Black Holes, Love, and a Journey In and Out of Calvinism

“Take care of who you’re becoming. You might have to live with yourself forever.”
― Austin Fischer, Faith in the Shadows: Finding Christ in the Midst of Doubt

“no misery to be saved from . . . So evil is necessary, in order to the highest happiness of the creature, and the completeness of that communication of God, for which he made the world; because the creature’s”
― Austin Fischer, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed: Black Holes, Love, and a Journey In and Out of Calvinism

“God is not so much the object of our knowledge as the cause of our wonder.”
― Austin Fischer, Faith in the Shadows: Finding Christ in the Midst of Doubt

“heart of belief there is a leap. For various biblical, rational, and experiential”
― Austin Fischer, Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed: Black Holes, Love, and a Journey In and Out of Calvinism

“Religion is the hope of the poor. Stuff is the opiate of the privileged.”
― Austin Fischer, Faith in the Shadows: Finding Christ in the Midst of Doubt

“Ultimately, responding to the surd of tragedy requires the insights of the poet more than the arguments of the logician.”
― Austin Fischer, Faith in the Shadows: Finding Christ in the Midst of Doubt

“I believe that there is nothing lovelier, deeper, more sympathetic, more rational, more manly, and more perfect than the Saviour;”
― Austin Fischer, Faith in the Shadows: Finding Christ in the Midst of Doubt

“But this is the essence of a life of faith, constantly forced to live with mysteries that are not of our own choosing.”
― Austin Fischer, Faith in the Shadows: Finding Christ in the Midst of Doubt