Quotes about Reality

We were made to find our deepest pleasure in admiring what is infinitely admirable, that is, the glory of God. The glory of God is not the psychological projection of human longing onto reality. On the contrary, inconsolable human longing is the evidence that we were made for God's glory.

Thinking is not just entertainment on the stage of life where nothing is real. It is really useful in knowing the God who is really there. It is useful in knowing what God has revealed about himself and about this world and how we should live in it.

God's reality is displayed to us in His Word or His world and we do not then feel in our heart any grief or longing or hope or fear or awe or joy or gratitude or confidence, then we may dutifully sing and pray and recite and gesture as much as we like, but it will not be real worship.

Relativism, as we saw in the previous chapter, undermines that effort. It kidnaps the happy handmaiden of truth and makes her serve the pride and pleasure of pragmatists. Relativists don't pursue truth. They make the denial of truth serve them.

Jesus's solution to our love affair with sin is that we be mastered by joy in a new reality, namely, God.

I should interweave my theology with prayer. I should frequently interrupt my talking about God by talking to God. Not far behind the theological sentence, "God is generous," should come the prayerful sentence, "Thank you, God." On the heels of, "God is glorious," should come, "I adore your glory." What I have come to see is that this is the way it must be if we are feeling God's reality in our hearts as well as describing it with our heads.

Edwards believed his Biblical theology was, in fact, a true rendering of reality, and therefore could stand confidently in the marketplace of philosophical ideas and give an account of itself--which in his hands it would do.

The first thing we learn is that worship has to do with real life. It is not a mythical interlude in a week of reality. Worship has to do with adultery and hunger and racial conflict.

Bottom up thinkers try to start from experience and move from experience to understanding. They don't start with certain general principles they think beforehand are likely to be true they just hope to find out what reality is like.

Epistemology models ontology.

The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.

It is impossible for finite minds to comprehend the work of redemption. Its mystery exceeds human knowledge; yet he who passes from death to life realizes that it is a divine reality. The beginning of redemption we may know here through a personal experience. Its results reach through the eternal ages.