The Church has surrendered her once lofty concept of God and has substituted for it one so low, so ignoble, as to be utterly unworthy of thinking, worshiping men.
Preface
The low view of God entertained almost universally among Christians is the cause of a hundred lesser evils everywhere among us. A whole new philosophy of the Christian life has resulted from this one basic error in our religious thinking.
Preface
We have lost our spirit of worship and our ability to withdraw inwardly to meet God in adoring silence.
Preface
It is impossible to keep our moral practices sound and our inward attitudes right while our idea of God is erroneous or inadequate.
Preface
What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.
Chapter 1
The most portentous fact about any man is not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like.
Chapter 1
I believe there is scarcely an error in doctrine or a failure in applying Christian ethics that cannot be traced finally to imperfect and ignoble thoughts about God.
Chapter 1
All the problems of heaven and earth, though they were to confront us together and at once, would be nothing compared with the overwhelming problem of God: That He is; what He is like; and what we as moral beings must do about Him.
Chapter 1
The man who comes to a right belief about God is relieved of ten thousand temporal problems...
Chapter 1
But unless the weight of the burden is felt the gospel can mean nothing to the man; and until he sees a vision of God high and lifted up, there will be no woe and no burden. Low views of God destroy the gospel for all who hold them.
Chapter 1
So necessary to the Church is a lofty concept of God that when that concept in any measure declines, the Church with her worship and her moral standards declines along with it. The first step down for any church is taken when it surrenders its high opinion of God.
Chapter 1
We do the greatest service to the next generation of Christians by passing on to them undimmed and undiminished that noble concept of God which we received from our Hebrew and Christian fathers of generations past.
Chapter 1
Teach us to know that we cannot know, for the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God. Let faith support us where reason fails, and we shall think because we believe, not in order that we may believe.
Chapter 2
When the Scripture states that man was made in the image of God, we dare not add to that statement and idea from our own head and make it mean "in the exact image." To do so is to make man a replica of God, and that is to lose the unicity of God and end with no God at all. It is to break down the wall, infinitely high, that separates That-which-is-God from that-which-is-not-God.
Chapter 2
Left to ourselves we tend immediately to reduce God to manageable terms.
Chapter 2
In Christ and by Christ, God effects complete self-disclosure, although He shows Himself not to reason, but to faith and love.
Chapter 2
For while the name of God is secret and his essential nature incomprehensible, He in condescending love has by revelation declared certain things to be true of Himself. These we call his attributes.
Chapter 2
For the purpose of this book an attribute of God is whatever God has in any way revealed as being true of himself.
Chapter 3
If an attribute is something true of God, it is also something that we can conceive as being true of Him. God, being infinite, must possess attributes about which we can know nothing. An attribute, as we can know it, is a mental concept, an intellectual response to God's self-revelation. It is an answer to a question, the reply God makes to our interrogation concerning Himself.
Chapter 3
The harmony of His being is the result not of a perfect balance of parts but of the absence of parts.
Chapter 3
He does not divide Himself to perform a work, but works in the total unity of His being.
Chapter 3
The divine attributes are what we know to be true of God. He does not possess them as qualities. They are how God is as He reveals Himself to His creatures.
