Elton Trueblood Quotes
Evangelism is not a professional job for a few trained men, but is instead the unrelenting responsibility of every person who belongs to the company of Jesus.
A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit.
This historic Christian doctrine of the divinity of Christ does not simply mean that Jesus is like God. It is far more radical than that. It means that God is like Jesus.
No vital Christianity is possible unless at least three aspects of it are developed. These are the inner life of devotion, the outer life of service, and the intellectual life of rationality.
It takes a noble man to plant a seed for a tree that will someday give shade to people he may never meet.
If the average church should suddenly take seriously the notion that every lay member man or woman is really a minister of Christ, we could have something like a revolution in a very short time.
Democracy is necessitated by the fact that all men are sinners; it is made possible by the fact that we know it.
The spoken word is never really effective unless it is backed up by a life, but it is also true that the living deed is never adequate without the support the spoken word can provide.
The world is equally shocked at hearing Christianity criticized and seeing it practiced.
The ultimate verification of our religion consists of the changed lives to which it can point and for which it is responsible.
Religion is never devoid of emotion, any more than love is. It is not a defect of religion, but rather its glory, that it speaks always the language of feeling.
We need to be agnostics first and then there is some chance at arriving at a sensible system of belief.
Deeply convinced of the reality of the divine will, he (Lincoln) had no patience at all with any who were perfectly sure they knew the details of the divine will.
Lincoln had entirely outgrown juvenile delight in religious argument. Talking with God seemed to the mature Lincoln more important than talking about Him.
He (Lincoln) recognized the delicate balance between immanence and transcendence, refusing to settle for either of these alone. His was a God who was both in the world and above the world.
He (Lincoln) was accustomed to hearing words, many of them boring, but he was not accustomed to group silence.
The Biblical language was so deeply embedded in the great man's mind that it became his normal way of speaking.
Take all of this Book upon reason that you can, and the balance on faith, and you will live and die a happier man.
Upon being given a Bible, President Abraham Lincoln replied, "In regard to this Great book, I have but to say, it is the best gift God has given to man.
A major element in Lincoln's greatness was the way in which he could hold a strong moral position without the usual accompaniment of self-righteousness.
Man is most free when he is most guided.
His (Lincoln's) patriotism was saved from idolatry by the overwhelming sense of the sovereignty of God.
He was too perplexed to please the conventional and too reverent. to please the infidels.
God, Lincoln believed, is seen more clearly events that in nature, though He maybe seen there also. It is a majestic thing, thought Lincoln, for a person to be RESPONSIBLE.
It is most remarkable that Lincoln, when he saw so much that was vulnerable in the leadership of the Church, did not move to the opposite error and become a scoffer.
The question, he (Lincoln) said over and over, is not what a man's particular abilities may be, but what his rights are as a human being made in God's image.
It is the vocation of the Christian in every generation to out-think all opposition.
