Quotes from Eric Metaxas

He said] when you read the Bible17, you must think that here and now God is speaking with me. . . . He wasn't as abstract as the Greek teachers and all the others. Rather, from the very beginning, he taught us that we had to read the Bible as it was directed at us, as the word of God directly to us. Not something general, not something generally applicable, but rather with a personal relationship to us.

most Britons went about their lives with no idea of the universe of horrors that existed under the British flag or the nightmarish way of life of the slaves, whose existence was nonetheless intimately intertwined with their own way of life thousands of miles away.

Wilberforce understood the idea that the law itself is a "teacher" and will lead people toward what it prescribes and away from what it prohibits. But he knew that a debased culture cannot be stemmed through legislation alone. Indeed, if one wishes to make certain laws, one must change the culture first, else those laws will never be passed. In

Wilberforce simply got caught up in the proceedings below and a desire bloomed in him to join the debate and say for the historical record what he was already thinking; perhaps he thought he might do as well as those extemporizing down on the floor and wished to try.

When eighteenth-century British society had retreated from the historical Christianity it had earlier embraced, the Christian character of the nation—which had given Britain, among other things, a proud tradition of almshouses to help the poor, dating all the way back to the tenth century—had all but disappeared.

Wilberforce manifestly lacked the personality to sit over an account ledger and do whatever was necessary to be a successful businessman in the merchant trade back in Hull.

He felt that what was especially missing from the life of Christians in Germany was the day-to-day reality of dying to self, of following Christ with every ounce of one's being in every moment, in every part of one's life.

philosophy was man's search for truth apart from God. It was a type of Barth's "religion," in which man himself tried to reach heaven or truth or God. But theology begins and ends with faith in Christ, who reveals himself to man; apart from such revelation, there could be no such thing as truth.

And so, in keeping with its national character, Britain chose a more civilized and decorous path away from religion: it would staunchly retain the outward trappings and forms of religion—which were all well and good and would help keep the lower classes better behaved—but it would deny religion any real power.

May God in his mercy lead us through these times; but above all, may he lead us to himself. . .

Britain continued to use the terms and the symbols of its religion and would never make a vulgar Gallic show of executing clerics, but it would reject real religion nonetheless.

By the time Wilberforce experienced his "Great Change," all of the social problems that would plague eighteenth-century Britain had come to full flower, having been unchecked by the social conscience of genuine Christian faith for nearly a hundred years.

Like the proverbial dead fish that rots first from the head, British society began to decay from the top; so our description of the situation must begin with the aristocracy.

Some wondered whether he was just kicking against the goads, but when someone asked Bonhoeffer whether he shouldn't join the German Christians in order to work against them from within, he answered that he couldn't. "If you board the wrong train," he said, "it is no use running along the corridor in the opposite direction

Take all we have, only give us peace'? In God's name…let us at least make one effort; and if we must fall, let us fall like men!

It was an odious process whereby one wined and dined one's constituents and gave speeches. It was all many degrees more shameless than anything we complain of today, not least because one was quite literally expected to pay each elector two guineas as a bribe.

King George III himself, it must be pointed out, stood out as a rare and notable exception to the advanced moral decay of those around him. He was deeply sensitive to his symbolic position as the head of the country and sincerely wished to set an example for the subjects he ruled.

The eldest son, the Prince of Wales, was the undisputed leader of the unfiltered pack and is believed, among other accomplishments, to have bedded seven thousand women; he is said to have snipped and kept a lock of hair from each of them.

The questions that are seriously put to us today by young theologians are: How do I learn to pray? How do I learn to read the Bible? If we cannot help them there we cannot help them at all.

Bonhoeffer's interest was not only in teaching them as a university lecturer. He wished to "disciple" them in the true life of the Christian. This ran the gamut, from understanding current events through a biblical lens to reading the Bible not just as a theology student but as a disciple of Jesus Christ.

These men were giants of their era and would remain legendary figures in England for generations to come. George Selwyn was one. Renowned as a wit and celebrated as a macabre connoisseur of corpses, criminals, and executions, he was something like a combination of Truman Capote and Vincent Price.

Jesus did not only communicate ideas and concepts and rules and principles for living. He lived. And by living with his disciples, he showed them what life was supposed to look like, what God had intended it to look like. It was not merely intellectual or merely spiritual. It was all these things together; it was something more. Bonhoeffer aimed to model the Christian life for his students. This led him to the idea that, to be a Christian, one must live with Christians.

There are Chestertonian aphorisms too: "Christianity preaches the infinite worth of that which is seemingly worthless and the infinite worthlessness of that which is seemingly so valued.

In his famous Letters and Papers from Prison, the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote: . . . how wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don't know.