Gerald L. Bray > Quotes

“A true theology must be a preachable theology, and it must speak to the hearts and minds of believers, even if they do not have an earned doctorate in the field. Academics must not be divorced from spirituality or practical matters that affect us as ordinary church members. If we cannot speak to them, we cannot speak to anybody, and our theological pretensions are worthless.”
― Gerald Bray

“The Bible is not a self-help manual for our improvement to the point where we are worthy of heaven, but the proclamation of God’s rescue plan, which he devised, carried out, and has now implemented in the mission of the church. The Christian life is therefore an appropriation of that grace, not a striving to achieve something beyond our grasp. It is a message of forgiveness for our sins, not of condemnation for having failed to make the grade.”
― Gerald L. Bray, Augustine on the Christian Life: Transformed by the Power of God

“Deists are not committed to accepting the biblical portrait of God, and they have a marked tendency to modify the biblical view in ways that make him more congenial to them. A particular favorite of theirs is to deny that there is any wrath in God, despite the fact that the Bible often speaks about it.”
― Gerald L. Bray, God Is Love: A Biblical and Systematic Theology

“The love God has for us is like the love of a shepherd for his sheep, as the Bible often reminds us. Sometimes the shepherd can guide his sheep simply by speaking to them and, ideally, that is all that should be needed. But sheep are often slow to respond, and then the shepherd has to nudge them along with his staff. Sometimes he has to grapple with them forcibly and insist that they follow him when they would rather go their own erratic way. But however hard it is for the shepherd to keep his flocks in order, he never abandons them. As the psalmist put it, “You are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.”2 The rod and the staff are the shepherd’s instruments of discipline. The sheep may resent them and try to resist their force, but they know that in the end they must go where their shepherd is leading them. As Jesus said, “The sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.”
― Gerald L. Bray, God Is Love: A Biblical and Systematic Theology

“Latin terminology was subsequently absorbed into English and may seem more natural to us today than Cranmer’s translation does. For example, in the first article we read that God is ‘without...passions’ which is somewhat ambiguous (at least to a modern ear), but the Latin is impassibilis, or ‘impassible’, which makes the meaning immediately clear – to a theologian, at least! Modern”
― Gerald L. Bray, The Faith We Confess- An Exposition of the Thirty-Nine Articles

“At the heart of Christian theology there lies a personal relationship with God. Like all personal relationships, it is based on a degree of knowledge undergirded by trust. What we do not know we leave to God’s judgment, because we believe that we can trust him to act in ways consistent with what he has told us. In human relationships we trust people all the time, even though we are fallible creatures and liable to disappoint others and be disappointed ourselves. How much more should we be prepared to trust God, who is infallible and will never let us down? The Bible is the record of a relationship between God and man. It”
― Gerald L. Bray, God Is Love: A Biblical and Systematic Theology

“At the heart of Christian theology there lies a personal relationship with God. Like all personal relationships, it is based on a degree of knowledge undergirded by trust. What we do not know we leave to God’s judgment, because we believe that we can trust him to act in ways consistent with what he has told us. In human relationships we trust people all the time, even though we are fallible creatures and liable to disappoint others and be disappointed ourselves. How much more should we be prepared to trust God, who is infallible and will never let us down?”
― Gerald L. Bray, God Is Love: A Biblical and Systematic Theology

“No longer can the church be seen as a school of moral achievement in which some pupils take all the prizes. On the contrary, it is a hospital for sick sinners, who are cured not by their own inner resources but by the healthy medicine of divine grace.”
― Gerald L. Bray, Augustine on the Christian Life: Transformed by the Power of God

“The Father is not the personification of the divine being, but the person of the Godhead who reminds us of what God really is and to whom the work of the Son and the Spirit in our lives is directed.”
― Gerald L. Bray, God Is Love: A Biblical and Systematic Theology

“Like skeptics in every age, the New Academics knew what they were against but not what they were for, so they could never provide an honest seeker after truth like Augustine with the peace of mind that he craved.”
― Gerald L. Bray, Augustine on the Christian Life: Transformed by the Power of God

“Paradoxical as it sounds, it is probably better to measure our spiritual progress by the degree of our awareness of sin rather than by our willingness to swear allegiance to Christ, since it is the former that reveals just how much we really understand the latter.”
― Gerald L. Bray, The Faith We Confess- An Exposition of the Thirty-Nine Articles

“Saint Hilary saith these words plainly in the ninth canon upon Matthew: ‘Faith only justifieth.’ 14 And Saint Basil, a Greek author, writeth thus: ‘This is a perfect and whole rejoicing in God when a man avaunteth not himself for his own righteousness, but knowledgeth himself to lack true justice and righteousness, and to be justified by the only faith in Christ. 15”
― Gerald Bray, The Books of Homilies: A Critical Edition

“Fire is real and is vitally important for human life, but we cannot touch it without suffering the consequences. So it is with God. His being and ours cannot coexist in direct contact with each other, but at the same time we cannot exist without him. The persons of the Godhead reveal this incomprehensible divine being to us, making it possible for us to have some connection with it in spite of our radical incompatibility with its nature, but they are not merely expressions of the divine being, nor are they bound by it.”
― Gerald L. Bray, God Is Love: A Biblical and Systematic Theology