Chris

“God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul?” Now these things did indeed make man glorious, by supplying what was wanting to him, namely, the friendship of God; but they profited God nothing, for God did not at all stand in need of man’s love. For the glory of God was wanting to man, which he could obtain in no other way than by serving God.”
― The Church Fathers, The Complete Ante-Nicene & Nicene and Post-Nicene Church Fathers Collection

“We have broken up for ourselves the fallow ground of divinity so as not to sow upon thorns, and have levelled the surface of the ground, being formed and forming others by Holy Scripture...”
― Gregory of Nazianzus, Five Theological Orations

“Attack the silence of Pythagoras, and the Orphic beans, and that preposterous brag, "Himself has spoken." Attack the "Ideas" of Plato, and the transbodiment and circulation of our souls, and the reminiscences, and the unlovely loves of lovely bodies, though directed to the beloved's soul. Attack the atheism of Epicurus, and his atoms, and his doctrine of pleasure, unworthy of a philosopher; or Aristotle's petty Providence, and his artificial system, and his discourses about the mortality of the soul, and the exclusively human focus his teaching. Attack the haughtiness of the Stoa, or the greed and vulgarity of the Cynic. Attack for me the emptiness that is full of absurdities - all that stuff about the gods and the sacrifices and the idols and the demons, whether beneficent or malignant, and all the tricks that people play with divination, the calling up of gods or of souls, and the power of stars.”
― Gregory of Nazianzus, The Five Theological Orations of Gregory of Nazianzus

“There is nothing in God's universe that is so utterly useless as a merely formal Christian. I mean by that, one who has the name but not the quality of a Christian...He has enough 'Christianity' to spoil everything else, but not enough to give him real happiness, peace and joy and abundance of life...They do not function as worldlings or Christians. They are nothing, neither salt nor light, neither one thing nor the other.”
― Martin Lloyd-Jones