Michael Roth > Michael's Quotes

“Jesus is Lord, and everything else is bullshit.”
― Stanley M. Hauerwas

“Never think that you need to protect God. Because anytime you think you need to protect God, you can be sure that you are worshipping an idol.”
― Stanley Hauerwas

“If God’s purpose for your job is that you serve the human community, then the way to serve God best is to do the job as well as it can be done.”
― Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Work

“The question is not if the candidate's heart is favorable to Christianity, but if he has Christ as his starting point even for politics, and will speak out His name!”
― Abraham Kuyper, Christianity: Total World And Life System

“Obedience is the thing, living in active response to the living God. The most important question we ask of this text is not, 'What does this mean?' but 'What can I obey?' A simple act of obedience will open up our lives to this text far more quickly than any number of Bible studies and dictionaries and concordances.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading

“Facts, like telescopes and wigs for gentlemen, were a seventeenth-century invention.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

“It is only by participation in a rational, practice-based community that one becomes rational.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

“Indeed, one of the functions of the structures of normality is that by making it unnecessary for almost everybody almost all the time to provide justifications for what they are doing or are about to do, they relieve us of what would otherwise be an intolerable burden.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

“If through a broken heart God can bring His purposes to pass in the world, then thank Him for breaking your heart.”
― Oswald Chambers

“The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Marriage as a long conversation. - When marrying you should ask yourself this question: do you believe you are going to enjoy talking with this woman into your old age? Everything else in a marriage is transitory, but most of the time that you're together will be devoted to conversation.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“The best friend will probably acquire the best wife, because a good marriage is founded on the talent for friendship.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“I have the courage, I believe, to doubt everything; I have the courage, I believe, to fight with everything; but I have not the courage to know anything; not the courage to possess, to own anything. Most people complain that the world is so prosaic, that life is not like romance, where opportunities are always so favorable. I complain that life is not like romance, where one had hard-hearted parents and nixies and trolls to fight, and enchanted princesses to free. What are all such enemies taken together, compared with the pale, bloodless, tenacious, nocturnal shapes with which I fight, and to whom I give life and substance?”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life

“The modern world is insane, not so much because it admits the abnormal as because it cannot recover the normal.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils

“The mature and well-balanced man, standing firmly with both feet on the earth, who has never been lamed and broken an half-blinded by the scandal of life, is as such the existentially godless man.”
― Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans

“To be pilgrims means that men must perpetually return to the starting-point of that naked humanity which is absolute poverty and utter insecurity. God must not be sought as though he sat enthroned upon the summit of religious attainment. He is to be found on the plain where men suffer and sin. The veritable pinnacle of religious achievement is attained when men are thrust down into the company of those who lie in the depths. The true faith is the "faith of Abraham which he had in uncircumcision"; the true children of Abraham are thy whom God is able to raise up "of these stones". Where this is overlooked, the first must become the last, for only the last can be first.”
― Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans

“If thinking wants to think God, then it must endeavor to tell stories.”
― Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute Between Theism and Atheism

“We all know that parents do not make children but that children make parents…Authentic parenting is one long sacrificial act…parenting reveals the way that sacrifice at once diminishes our life as we knew it…while at the same time revealing to us larger and infinitely more fascinating forms of life…Parents know experientially that the very process which makes them suffer also makes them grow.”
― Luke Timothy Johnson, The Living Gospel

“The man of today is no longer able to understand his neighbor because his profession is his whole life, and the technical specialization of this life has forced him to live in a closed universe.”
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

“Christians were never meant to be normal. We’ve always been holy troublemakers, we’ve always been creators of uncertainty, agents of dimension that’s incompatible with the status quo; we do not accept the world as it is, but we insist on the world becoming the way that God wants it to be. And the Kingdom of God is different from the patterns of this world.”
― Jacques Ellul

“The purpose of journeying together in spiritual friendship and spiritual community (whether there are just two of you or whether you are in a small group) is to listen to one another's desire for God, to nurture that desire in each other and to support one another in seeking a way of life that is consistent with that desire. ”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation

“Everyone has some kind of philosophy, some general worldview, which to men of other views will seem mythological.”
― H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture: 50th Anniversary Edition―Being True to Christ in a Materialistic Age

“Nothing is as evanescent in history as the pansophic theories that flourish among the illuminati of all times under the bright sunlight of the latest scientific discoveries; and nothing can be more easily dismissed by later periods as mere speculation.”
― H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture: 50th Anniversary Edition―Being True to Christ in a Materialistic Age

“Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.

Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.

No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.”
― Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History

“Theology is not promoted by culture but by the belief in God’s revelation as an event beyond all human history, to which Scripture bears witness and which finds confirmation in the Confessions of our Church. Only a theology that clings inexorably to these most essential presuppositions can help build up a Church that really stands unshaken amidst all the attacks of the spirit of the age. And such a Church alone will be the salt of the earth and the light of the world; any other Church will perish along with the world.”
― John B. Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch