Quotes About Redemption

Prayer, to the patriarchs and prophets, was more than the recital of well-known and well-worn phrases. It was the outpouring of the heart. Beset by perils, persecutions, pain and privations, they naturally turned to God in their need, believing that He was able to redeem them out of their troubles.

The resurrection is the fundamental restoration of all culture.

The cross is the divine settlement with the divine condemnation of sin.

Christ is not the founder of Christianity, nor the first confessor of it, nor the first Christian. But he is Christianity itself, in its preparation, fulfillment, and consummation

God is above the world, and is also above sin and all evil. He allowed it because he could expiate it. So he maintained through all centuries and among all men the longing and the capacity for redemption, and wrought that redemption himself in the fulness of time, in the midst of history, in the crucified Christ.

The cross of Christ divides history into two parts — the preparation for and the accomplishment of reconciliation;

God does not say that He will be our God if we do this or that thing. But He says that He will put enmity, that He will be our God, and that in Christ He will grant us all things. The covenant of grace can throughout the centuries remain the same because it depends entirely upon God and because God is the Immutable One and the Faithful One.

Culture, therefore, sinks into the background; man must first become a son of God before he can be, in a genuine sense, a cultured being.

But the electing love of God is at the same time a forgiving love. God not only elects and calls, but gives himself to his people; he joins himself to them so intimately and tenderly that he charges their guilt and transfers it, as it were, to himself.

Man can as little make propitiation for his sin as he can forgive it himself. But God can do both, atone and forgive; he can do the one just because he can do the other.

Theology leads through soteriology to eschatology.

Conversion is a turning back to God, but at the same time a coming to one's self.

311eschatology lives in the heart of all.

The essence of the Christian religion consists in the reality that the creation of the Father, ruined by sin, is restored in the death of the Son of God, and re-created by the grace of the Holy Spirit into a kingdom of God.

The truth is of more value than empirical life: Christ sacrificed his life for it.

The heaven that he won for us by his atoning death presupposes a hell from which he delivered us. The eternal life he imparted to us presupposes an eternal death from which he saved us.

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

If there ever is to be a blessed humanity it must be preceded by a radical change in human nature.

The peculiarity of the Christian religion as has been so often shown and acknowledged even by opponents,248 lies in the person of Christ.

250Christianity is no mere revelation of God in the past, but it is, in connection with the past, a work in the midst of this and every time. All other religions try to obtain salvation by the works of men, but Christianity makes a strong protest against this; it is not autosoteric but heterosoteric; it does not preach self-redemption, but glories in redemption by Christ alone. Man does not save himself, and does not save God, but God alone saves man, the whole man, man for eternity.

Such a scientific defense of the dogma, i.e., of the entire content of revelation and of Christianity as a whole, is possible for the reason that nature and grace, creation and redemption, coming as they do from one and the same God, are not and cannot be in conflict.

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

if sin bears an ethical character, then redemption is possible, and conversion is in principle the conquest of sin, the death of the old and the resurrection of the new man.

Men may differ as to the nature and the reach of conversion, but its necessity is established beyond all doubt; the whole of humanity proclaims the truth of the fall.