David J. Kleinhans > David J.'s Quotes

“Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“If you want God's grace, all you need is need, all you need is nothing.”
― Timothy Keller, Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters

“And everyone wants to know: Who? Why? The victims ask the hardest of all the questions: How is it possible that the person I loved so much lit no spark of humanity in you?”
― Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“I love mankind, he said, "but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Here is an important distinction with far-reaching implications for Christian behavior. The deeds of Christians in this present time — however insignificant they may seem, however “vain” they may appear to those who value worldly success — are already being built into God’s advancing kingdom.”
― Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ

“If our preaching does not intersect with the times, we are fleeing the call to take up the cross. We can learn from the example of Dostoevsky, who in The Brothers Karamazov used material that he read in the newspapers to give a human face to the problem of evil.”
― Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ

“It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ. My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“Being a disciple of Jesus is not primarily a matter of getting the right ideas and doctrines and beliefs into your head in order to guarantee proper behavior; rather, it's a matter of being the kind of person who loves rightly--who loves God and neighbor and is oriented to the world by the primacy of that love. We are made to be such people by our immersion in the material practices of Christian worship--through affective impact, over time, of sights and smell in water and wine.”
― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

“We are not what we do, we are not what we have, we are not what others think of us. Coming home is claiming the truth. I am the beloved child of a loving creator.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen

“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“I got entangled in my own data, and my conclusion directly contradicts the original idea from which I start. Starting from unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism. I will add, however, that apart from my solution of the social formula, there can be no other.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Demons

“Grace comes to us in the suffering of sin. There is a sermon in the damage we have done to ourselves and to others. Pain becomes the doorway to salvation, and our tears are a bridge for the awful grace of God.”
― Richard Beck, Trains, Jesus, and Murder: The Gospel according to Johnny Cash

“As Greg Boyd argues in his book God at War, when doubting and disenchanted Christians lose touch with the warfare worldview of the Bible, we begin to treat the suffering of the world like it’s a logical puzzle to be solved rather than a reality to be resisted.[1] And when we treat suffering as an intellectual problem, all that happens is that our doubts and questions pile up. Our mind starts running in a circle, chasing its own tail.”
― Richard Beck, Reviving Old Scratch: Demons and the Devil for Doubters and the Disenchanted

“The trouble with the Devil is that we see him in the faces of those we hate, justifying our violence toward them.”
― Richard Beck, Reviving Old Scratch: Demons and the Devil for Doubters and the Disenchanted

“Do your little bit of good where you are; it's those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.”
― Desmond Tutu

“When we see others as the enemy, we risk becoming what we hate. When we oppress others, we end up oppressing ourselves. All of our humanity is dependent upon recognizing the humanity in others.”
― Desmond Tutu

“No regrets" doesn't mean living with courage, it means living without reflection. To live without regret is to believe you have nothing to learn, no amends to make, and no opportunity to be braver with your life. (P.211)”
― Brené Brown, Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution

“Man is not a beast of burden, and the Sabbath is not for the purpose of enhancing the efficiency of his work.”
― Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man

“It is only the infinite mercy and love of God that has prevented us from tearing ourselves to pieces and destroying His entire creation long ago. People seem to think that it is in some way a proof that no merciful God exists, if we have so many wars. On the contrary, consider how in spite of centuries of sin and greed and lust and cruelty and hatred and avarice and oppression and injustice, spawned and bred by the free wills of men, the human race can still recover, each time, and can still produce man and women who overcome evil with good, hatred with love, greed with charity, lust and cruelty with sanctity. How could all this be possible without the merciful love of God, pouring out His grace upon us? Can there be any doubt where wars come from and where peace comes from, when the children of this world, excluding God from their peace conferences, only manage to bring about greater and greater wars the more they talk about peace?”
― Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them”
― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

“And so the Savior of the world directs us toward a re-appropriation of Lamech’s seventy time seven equation, applying it to the practice of radical forgiveness. The most remarkable thing about Christ-informed ethics is its commitment to forgiveness—indeed, if Christianity is about anything, it’s about forgiveness. So Jesus calls us beyond the ever-escalating revenge of Lamech and beyond the mitigated revenge of Moses into a world where revenge is renounced altogether. Jesus saves the world by turning exponential revenge into exponential forgiveness.”
― Brian Zahnd, The Unvarnished Jesus: A Lenten Journey

“the Platonized eschatology so popular over many centuries (how will my soul get to heaven?) has played host to a moralized anthropology (what’s to be done about my sin?), generating a quasi-pagan soteriology (God killed Jesus instead of punishing me).11 This has been assumed to be what Paul was saying in these letters. More specifically, when people express “faith” in this line of thought, they are assured that they are therefore forgiven and heaven-bound. This, it has been assumed, is what Paul meant by “justification.” One can see a low-grade version of this when young persons, moved by a sermon or perhaps by an apologetic argument, say a prayer of Christian commitment and are thereupon informed that they are now “justified by faith,” that they are therefore going to heaven, and that they must not try to supplement this pure, justifying “faith” either with moral effort or with religious ritual.”
― N.T. Wright, Galatians (Commentaries for Christian Formation

“Transformation has to do with the way the walls separating us from others and from our deepest self begin to disappear. Between all of us fragile human beings stand walls built on loneliness and the absence of God, walls built on fear fear that becomes depression or a compulsion to prove that we are special.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Living Gently in a Violent World: The Prophetic Witness of Weakness

“The world? The world is not interested in us. Today, everything is possible, even the crematoria …” His voice broke. “Father,”
― Elie Wiesel, Night

“For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth - that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Through compassion it is possible to recognize that the craving for love that people feel resides also in our own hearts, that the cruelty the world knows all too well is also rooted in our own impulses. Through compassion we also sense our hope for forgiveness in our friends' eyes and our hatred in their bitter mouths. When they kill, we know that we could have done it; when they give life, we know that we can do the same. For a compassionate person nothing human is alien: no joy and no sorrow, no way of living and no way of dying.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Wounded Healer

“Isn’t this what you yearn for? Aren’t you tired of living at a pace that blurs out beauty, peace, or joy? Don’t you want to be at home?”
― Rich Villodas, The Deeply Formed Life: Five Transformative Values to Root Us in the Way of Jesus

“Sabbath is not a reward for hard work. Sabbath is a gift that precedes work and enables us to work. (…) As with God’s Grace, rest is never a reward; it’s a gift.”
― Rich Villodas, The Deeply Formed Life: Five Transformative Values to Root Us in the Way of Jesus

“Here’s my point: the solution to an overbusy life is not more time. It’s to slow down and simplify our lives around what really matters.”
― John Mark Comer, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to stay emotionally healthy and spiritually alive in the chaos of the modern world