Quotes from Leland Ryken

Puritan leaders, at least, valued an educated mind over material riches. Cotton Mather admonished his congregation with the comment, "If your main concern be to get the riches of this world for your children, and leave a belly full of this world unto them, it looks very suspiciously as if you were yourselves the people of this world, whose portion is only in this life."30

O calvinismo não ensina uma ética de autoconfiança, como ensina nossa ética moderna do trabalho. É, ao contrário, uma ética da graça: quaisquer recompensas tangíveis advindas do trabalho são o dom da graça de Deus.

The task is rather to assess whether and to what degree works are Christian in their viewpoint. Christian enthusiasts for literature too often seek to baptize every work of literature that they love.

William Perkins said, "The end of a man's calling is not to gather riches for himself…but to serve God in the serving of man, and in the seeking the good of all men.

Vamos trazer nossos filhos tão próximo do céu quanto pudermos... Está em nosso poder restringi-los e reformá-los, e isso devemos fazer".

How does one balance the fallen and redeemed aspects of life in the artistic portrayal of human experience in the world?

For the Puritans, the God-centered life meant making the quest for spiritual and moral holiness the great business of life.

Stressing the God-centered life can lead to an otherworldly withdrawal from everyday earthly life.

The Puritans removed organs and paintings from churches, but bought them for private use in their homes.

With so many contradictory renditions of the biblical text, the public has lost confidence that we can actually know what the Bible says. It is an easy step from this skepticism to an indifference about what the Bible says.

My claim is simply that the literary approach is one necessary way to read and interpret the Bible, an approach that has been unjustifiably neglected. Despite that neglect, the literary approach builds at every turn on what biblical scholars have done to recover the original, intended meaning of the biblical text.

There is a quiet revolution going on in the study of the Bible. At its center is a growing awareness that the Bible is a work of literature and that the methods of literary scholarship are a necessary part of any complete study of the Bible.

The oldest theory of art belongs to the Greeks, who regarded art as an imitation (mimesis) of reality. The strength of that theory is that it explains the way in which art takes its materials from real life.

The goal of Bible translation is be transparent to the original text - to see as clearly as possible what the biblical authors actually wrote.

Puritanism was a youthful, vigorous movement.

No group of people has been more unjustly maligned in the twentieth century than the Puritans. As a result, we approach the Puritans with an enormous baggage of culturally ingrained prejudice.

William Perkins said, "The end of a man's calling is not to gather riches for himself…but to serve God in the serving of man, and in the seeking the good of all men.

The Bible is obviously a mixed book. Literary and nonliterary (expository, explanatory) writing exist side by side within the covers of this unique book.

In a sermon I heard recently, the minister claimed that the portrait of God as a storm god (a literary motif that he did not name) in Psalm 97 is based on allusions to the Exodus and is 'not mere window dressing,' that is, metaphoric. As I observed to this preacher later, he used a metaphor in his denigration of metaphor as "mere window dressing.

De fato, a saúde da igreja depende do que acontece na família.

Os puritanos pensavam que o futuro da igreja repousava num clero distinguido... por um novo fervor, um equipamento intelectual superior, um poder de comunicar... O principal propósito do novo clérigo era comunicar zelo aos leigos, tornando-os capazes de unirem-se para selecionar seus próprios ministros, examinar suas próprias vidas espirituais, dirigir orações em família, ler livros santos e tomar parte na administração eclesiástica.[

No coração do puritanismo estava a crença de que a graça de Deus é a fonte de todo benefício humano e que não se pode adquiri-la por mérito humano.

dizer quantos autores temos lido, o quanto somos familiarizados com os escolásticos, quão linguisticamente críticos nós somos ou coisa semelhante. É uma miserável ostentação".

Since God is the one who calls people to their work, the worker becomes a steward who serves God.