Quotes About Belief

conversion is a necessary and moral duty for every man.

religious experience is neither the source nor the foundation of religious truth;

All worldviews, therefore, end in an eschatology and all efforts at reformation are animated by faith in the future.

faith, which forms its positive side is at the same time cognitio and fiducia, a trustful knowledge and a knowing trust.

Ethical culture must be a philosophy of revelation or it cannot exist.

Christian religion cannot abandon this supernaturalism without annihilating itself.

Formerly men said that life was thought, but now we are told that life is will.

311eschatology lives in the heart of all.

One arrives at metaphysics, at a philosophy of religion, only if from another source one has gained the certainty that religion is not just an interesting phenomenon—comparable to belief in witches and ghosts—but truth, the truth that God exists, reveals himself, and is knowable.

The notion that all peoples are on the road to progress is as incorrect as that they are continuously declining and degenerating.

Without God all things go wrong, both in our living and in our thinking. The denial of the existence of God means the elevation of the creature into the place of God.

In case a dogma is not based on divine authority, it is wrong to call it by that name, and it should not have a place in the faith of the church.

All religion is supernatural, and rests upon the presupposition that God is distinct from the world and yet works in the world.

Atheism is not proper to man by nature, but develops at a later stage of life, on the ground of philosophical reflection; like scepticism, it is an intellectual and ethical abnormality, which only confirms the rule. By nature every man believes in God.

No psychology of religion can teach us what conversion is and ought to be; the Scriptures alone can tell us that.

If there is no infallible Scripture "there can exist only a subjective and purely individual notion of what belongs to Christian faith." All ways are good, if they but lead to faith – not to what is contained in faith, for this differs endlessly.

Without faith in the existence, the revelation, and the knowability of God, no religion is possible.

Metaphysics, the belief in the absolute as a holy power, always forms the foundation of ethics.

The doctrine of evolution thus takes the place of the old religion in the modern man.320It is no science; it does not rest on undeniable facts; it has often in the past and in the present been contradicted by the facts. But that does not matter; miracle is the dearest child of faith.

the plan of salvation in the Christian religion determines the method of Christian theology.

Conversion is the sole and the absolutely peculiar way to heaven.

328An optimism which is exclusively built on evolution is always transmuted into pessimism if one ponders a little more deeply.

Although every man believes that his decisions and resolutions involve the most multifarious factors, in reality they are mere oscillation between flight and longing.

In de tijd dat ik veronderstelde een revolutionair te zijn liet ik mijn baard groeien. De revolutie kwam echter niet. Ik had te weinig idealen.