QUOTABLES/ZINGERS
 
 


 "It is widely acknowledged that we tend to find in scripture exactly what we have conceived as already being there, since none of us can easily face the threatening possibility that our 'received' understanding does not coincide with the Bible. (The problem is compounded if we are involved in teaching or preaching the Bible.) A religious doctrine which has been accepted intellectually and emotionally is dislodged with great difficulty."

 

Anthony F. Buzzard
Charles F. Hunting
The Doctrine of the Trinity;
Christianity's Self-Inflicted Wound

 
 


 We have a great deal to learn and unlearn. Nevertheless, let us have the same readiness of faith which is recorded of Abraham, who "when he was called....went out not knowing whither he went." Let us not be in a hurry to form a new creed, and thereby reconstruct the fetters from which by grace we have been set at liberty.

Charles Welch

 
 
Entertain no false ideas of life, and then life can be a blessed thing.  Life is a pilgrimage, a series of halts and moving on again.  When we make up our minds to achieve anything for its own sake then we find that all is vanity and vexation of spirit.  When we realize that nothing is a goal in itself, but merely a means to an end, we shall not call the time wasted that helped us on another stage of our pilgrimage, even though the moment we achieved some object of desire, it ceased to attract or be of service.  

 

Ecclesiastes  by Charles H. Welch

 
 


 Let a member of such sects dare to learn and discover some new truth from the Word of God, which happens to be different from what has been determined on by the sects themselves, and at once he is made to experience the worst features of "religion," and to realize, even in his private life, the power of a secret inquisition, which is as real as that of Rome, and whose tortures, though not physical or in the body, are as acutely felt, and may have after effects on bodily health and mental powers.

Great Cloud of Witnesses, E.W. Bullinger,

 
 

No sooner is any new impulse given either to philosophy or to religion than there arises a class of men who copy the form without the substance, and try to make the echo of the past sound like the voice of the present. So it has been with Christianity. It came into the educated world in the simple dress of a Prophet of Righteousness. It won that world by the stern reality of its life, by the subtle bonds of its brotherhood, by its divine message of consolation and of hope. Around it thronged the race of eloquent talkers who persuaded it to change its dress and to assimilate its language to their own. It seemed thereby to win a speedier and completer victory. But it purchased conquest at the price of reality. With that its progress stopped.

 
Edwin Hatch,

The Influence of Greek Ideas on Christianity

 
 



 The truth flowing from this is so important that, if it should compel us to revise our own views in some particulars, or even to re-write certain matters, let us together thank God for the light that reveals further truth, and for the grace which enables us to receive, believe, and use it.
 

E. W. Bullinger, Things to Come, Volume 13, page 38