Category Archives: The nature of religion
Doctrine and Life, Not Just Doctrine
“Doctrine is important, but it is not an end in itself. There is to be an experiential reality, moment by moment.” -Francis Schaeffer, True Spirituality
Everybody is Religious
“Your religion is what you do with your solitude.” -William Temple
Why, “Just having a good time” doesn’t work as a philosophy of life
“You might decide simply to have as good a time as possible. The universe is a universe of nonsense, but since you are here, grab what you can. Unfortunately, however, there is, on these terms, so very little left to grab – only the coarsest sensual pleasures. You can’t, except in the lowest animal sense, be in love with a girl if you know (and keep on remembering) that all the beauties both of her person and of her character are a momentary and accidental pattern produced by the collision of atoms, and that your own response to them is only a sort of psychic phosphorescence arising from the behavior of your genes. You can’t go on getting any very serious pleasure from music if you know and remember that its air of significance is a pure illusion, that you like it only because your nervous system is irrationally conditioned to like it. You may still, in the lowest sense, have a “good time”; but just in so far as it becomes very good, just in so far as it ever threatens to push you on from cold sensuality into real warmth and enthusiasm and joy, so far you will be forced to feel the hopeless disharmony between your own emotions and the universe in which you really live.” – C.S. Lewis, “On Living in an Atomic Age”
The Ultimate Success
“A faith that doesn’t require success, doesn’t need success is the ultimate success.” -Tim Keller, sermon “A Better Resurrection”
“He lacks nothing, but our Need-love, as Plato saw, is ‘the son of Poverty’. It is the accurate reflection in consciousness of our actual nature. We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.” -C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
What Religion Does
“It is one of the greatest blessings of mankind, though many denounce it as a curse. Not only does it touch the deepest springs of man’s life, but it also controls his thoughts and feelings and desires.” -Louis Berkhof, Summary of Christian Doctrine
The Nightmare Driving the American Dream
Religion without Faith
“Religion without faith is a deadly thing.” -R.C. Sproul
Despair, Arrogance, Self-Reliance
“Despair and arrogance are two sides of the same coin-and that coin is called self-reliance.” Andrew Davis, Revitalize
A Pilgrim's Theology 