Quotes About Truth

Do the right thing, seek the truth, defend the weak, live courageous lives.

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.

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.

Do not try to make the Bible relevant. Its relevance is axiomatic .

291 The German Christians had convinced themselves that "evangelizing" Germany was worth any price, including eviscerating the gospel by preaching hatred against the Jews. But Bonhoeffer knew that twisting the truth to sell it more effectively was not confined to the German Christians. Members of the Confessing Church had also shaved the truth betimes.

One cannot simply read the Bible, like other books. One must be prepared really to enquire of it. Only thus will it reveal itself. Only if we expect from it the ultimate answer, shall we receive it. That is because in the Bible God speaks to us. And one cannot simply think about God in one's own strength, one has to enquire of him. Only if we seek him, will he answer us.

freedom must be won under the compulsion of a necessity. Freedom for the church comes from the necessity of the Word of God.

Bonhoeffer "was a person about whom one had the feeling that he was completely whole," said one Finkenwalde ordinand, "a man who believes in what he thinks and does what he believes in.

twisting of the holiest and highest truth in the universe.

Luther always maintained that he was probably born in 1484, but neither Luther nor even his own mother could be sure, and current reckoning puts it more likely at either 1482 or 1483, with the preponderance of evidence favoring the latter, so that in the course of this book we shall use that year.

respect for truth and for other human beings of different opinions formed the foundation of a civil society in which one might disagree graciously and might reason together civilly and productively.

Every culture and era flatters itself that we are finally seeing what previous eras and cultures could not see because of their own blinders and ideological lenses.

The place where the questions about the reality of God and about the reality of the world are answered at the same time is characterized solely by the name: Jesus Christ. God

The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.

But Bonhoeffer was no mere academic. For him, ideas and beliefs were nothing if they did not relate to the world of reality outside one's mind.

The place where the questions about the reality of God and about the reality of the world are answered at the same time is characterized solely by the name: Jesus Christ. God and the world are enclosed in this name . . . we cannot speak rightly of either God or the world without speaking of Jesus Christ. All concepts of reality that ignore Jesus Christ are abstractions.

The religion of Christ is not a tidbit after one's bread; on the contrary, it is the bread or it is nothing. People should at least understand and concede this if they call themselves Christian.

If it turns out that the thing we believed in or wanted to believe in is not true and real, we may experience a momentary letdown, but in the end we will be in a far better place than if we had blindly clung to something that was really just wish-fulfillment

religion to other religions. Then he came to his main point: the essence of Christianity is not about religion at all, but about the person of Christ.

Science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration towards truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot imagine a scientist without that profound faith.

Years later it occurred to me that I was doing the same thing when I was helping my daughter memorize "Paul Revere's Ride." I was teaching her to love sacrifice and goodness and truth and beauty, and I was teaching her the history of America and therefore teaching her to love America

when Melanchthon recalled it, although, as we have said, he was not yet in Wittenberg when it happened, and was really only recounting the recollections of others who had been there. So when he did, he was speaking in the way so many of us do when remembering things: we aren't telling an untruth but conflating things in a way that is not perfectly and literally accurate, specifically to make a larger point, and, as good fiction does, to tell a greater truth.

You can speak of the ethical foundations of science, but you cannot speak of the scientific foundations of ethics.

Anyone on the side of truth, wherever it led, was a compatriot to be lauded.