D. A. Carson Quotations

No one believes more strongly than I do that every Christian should be a theologian. In that sense, we all need to work it out. I want all Christians who can read, to read their Bibles and to read beyond the Bible - to read the history and theology.

God is a talking God, and thus you must come to wrestle with him. You must wrestle with what he said.

Hell is not filled with people who are deeply sorry for their sins. It is filled with people who for all eternity still shake their puny fist in the face of God Almighty.

Either worrying drives out prayer, or prayer drives out worrying.

It's not a matter of us standing outside it and ticking off the boxes: yes, the Bible is faithful here; yes, it's telling the truth there, and so on, but rather granted that it's God-given. It's the frame of reference that shows us how to live in, tells us how to think about everything.

If the text is God's Word, it is appropriate that we respond with reverence, a certain fear, a holy joy, a questing obedience.

Effectiveness in teaching the Bible is purchased at the price of much study, some of it lonely, all of it tiring.

A billion years or so into eternity, how many toys we accumulated during this life will not seem too terribly important.

There is no sense in which Mohammed is viewed as a writer.

Do you wish to see God's love? Look at the cross. Do you wish to see God's wrath? Look at the cross.

The way to be anxious about nothing is to be prayerful about everything.

That God normally operates the universe consistently makes science possible; that he does not always do so ought to keep science humble.

Others have questions about how it is that God and human beings can both be speaking through the one document such that you can see and read the personalities of the human authors with their individual vocabularies and literary genres, and yet this is nevertheless the word of God. How can that be? This is quite a contrast with Islam, for example, which holds that the Koran has been dictated in Arabic by God and as a result Mohammed is nothing more than the one who memorizes the word so as to pass it on. There is nothing of human contribution.

The place where God has supremely destroyed all human arrogance and pretension is the cross.

Worship is the proper response of all moral, sentient beings to God, ascribing all honor and worth to their Creator-God precisely because he is worthy, delightfully so.

The person who loves his life will lose it: it could not be otherwise, for to love one's life is a fundamental denial of God's sovereignty, of God's rights, and a brazen elevation of self to the apogee of one's perception, and therefore an idolatrous focus on self, which is the heart of all sin

We want to fan the flames of Christians for whom inerrancy and the authority of Scripture are not mere shibboleths, but part of her life beat, part of the beating heart of what makes them tick. They revere Scripture, not because Scripture becomes an idol, but because it discloses God who is especially come after us in salvation and redemption through the person of his son, his cross, his resurrection, the full sweep of the gospel.

True freedom is not the liberty to do anything we please, but the liberty to do what we ought; and it is genuine liberty because doing what we ought now pleases us

Love the church because Jesus loves it.

Some people say What's the use of the term if it has to be so fully documented and constrained and footnoted and all the rest. My response to that is: there is no theological word that does not have to be similarly footnoted and constrained: justification, spirit, sanctification etc. Any term can be distorted or domesticated or fly off the handle because of another alien philosophical structure that's imposed on the text and so on. Inerrancy is no different from what we find in every other theologically loaded word.

When Christians speak of the authority of Scripture, because Christians believe that this word, even though it's mediated through many different human authors, nevertheless is God breathed and is revealed by God and is utterly reliable and all that it says, with all of its different literary genres, it's trustworthy and without mistake or distortion. It is trustworthy and therefore, because it is from God it has God's authority.

The Bible does not tell us that life in this world will be fair. Evil and sin are not Victorian gentlemen; they do not play fair.

There is a certain kind of maturity that can be attained only through the discipline of suffering.

A text without a context is a pretext for a proof text.

Justice is not always done in this world; we see that everyday. But on the Last Day it will be done for all to see. And no one will be able to complain by saying, "This isn't fair."

"Biblical theology" refers to something more precise than theology that is faithful to the Bible. It might be helpful to draw a contrast: at the risk of oversimplification, systematic theology tends to organize theology topically and with an eye cast on its contemporary relevance, while biblical theology tends to organize the same biblical material so that it is easier to see the distinctive contribution of each biblical book and human author, and to trace the trajectories of themes across the Bible so we see how the books of the Bible hold together.

We overcome the accuser of our brothers and sisters, we overcome our consciences, we overcome our bad tempers, we overcome our defeats, we overcome our lusts, we overcome our fears, we overcome our pettiness on the basis of the blood of the Lamb.

Christians have learned that when there seems to be no other evidence of God's love, they cannot escape the cross.

The person who prays more in public than in private reveals that he is less interested in God's approval than in human praise. Not piety but a reputation for piety is his concern.

Authority can mean different things to different people. For example, some document or other may be authoritative for particular group even though it's not reliable. It's just that the group has accepted that document as authoritative for their group. And some documents are truthful and reliable but they are ignored, so they have no authority for that particular group.

Draw nigh to God, so that you may dread the grave as little as your bed. Draw nigh to God, that you may live a happy and useful life. Drawing nigh to God is the most concentrated energy of the soul. Effective prayer is the fruit of a relationship with God, not a technique for acquiring blessings.

The broader problem is that a great deal of popular preaching and teaching uses the bible as a pegboard on which to hang a fair bit of Christianized pop psychology or moralizing encouragement, with very little effort to teach the faithful, from the Bible, the massive doctrines of historic confessional Christianity.

There is no long-range effective teaching of the Bible that is not accompanied by long hours of ongoing study of the Bible.

God has disclosed of himself in human words with such magnificent self accommodation to our limitations. Precisely so that we may be his holy people and reverence everything that he says, cherish it, value it, and thus live it out.

A prayerless person is a disaster waiting to happen.

The kingdom of heaven is worth infinitely more than the cost of discipleship, and those who know where the treasure lies joyfully abandon everything else to secure it.

If you want to see what judgment looks like, go to the cross. If you want to see what love looks like, go to the cross.

For example, the Bible does say this is a proposition, "There is no God." But of course the context of Psalm 14:1 enriches it a bit: "the fool has said in his heart, there is no God." So there are contextual constraints and when you finish putting in all the contextual constraints and sophisticated discussions of what inerrancy is and isn't.

Imagination is a God-given gift; but if it is fed dirt by the eye, it will be dirty. All sin, not least sexual sin, begins with the imagination. Therefore what feeds the imagination is of maximum importance in the pursuit of kingdom righteousness.

Damn all false antitheses to hell, for they generate false gods, they perpetuate idols, they twist and distort our souls, they launch the church into violent pendulum swings who oscillations succeed only in dividing brothers and sisters in Christ

Both God's love and God's wrath are ratcheted up in the move from the old covenant to the new, from the Old Testament to the New. These themes barrel along through redemptive history, unresolved, until they come to a resounding climax - in the cross.

I can say that it's 10 miles from my home to Trinity, when in fact that's not quite right, it's off by about 10%, but nobody would say that I'm telling a lie or making a mistake when I rounded off because that's the way we speak and rounded off terms regularly.

In any Christian view of life, self-fulfillment must never be permitted to become the controlling issue. The issue is service, the service of real people. The question is, 'How can I be most useful?', not, 'How can I feel most useful?'

... the worst possible heritage to leave with children: high spiritual pretensions and low performance.

It is a cheap zeal that reserves its passions to combat only the sins and temptations of others.

It's not as if the New Testament writers came along and said, "The culmination of Old Testament books is more books, New Testament books." In some ways they thought instead of the culmination of Old Testament books being Christ himself, the word incarnate as the opening verses of Hebrews 1 put it. In the past God spoke to the fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his son and the son is revelation.

The way you lose the gospel is not by denying it, but by assuming it.

The Christian's whole desire, at its best and highest, is that Jesus Christ be praised. It is always a wretched bastardization of our goals when we want to win glory for ourselves instead of for him.

Sin defies God, utterly corrupts each individual, corrodes all social relationships, and issues in death.

Make a mistake in the interpretation of one of Shakespeare’s plays, falsely scan a piece of Spenserian verse, and there is unlikely to be an entailment of eternal consequence; but we cannot lightly accept a similar laxity in the interpretation of Scripture. We are dealing with God’s thoughts: we are obligated to take the greatest pains to understand them truly and to explain them clearly.

Much praying is not done because we do not plan to pray. We do not drift into spiritual life; we do not drift into disciplined prayer. We will not grow in prayer unless we plan to pray. That means we must self-consciousl y set aside time to do nothing but pray.

Sin corrupts even our good deeds. We injure our shoulder trying to pat ourselves on the back.

We are dealing with God's thoughts: we are obligated to take the greatest pains to understand them truly and to explain them clearly.

To know God is to be transformed, and thus to be introduced to a life that could not otherwise be experienced.

I suspect that relatively few people will sit down and read 1250 pages [ of The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures.] all the way through from cover to cover. There may be some, but not everybody. But there are many, many, many different Christian, theological, pastoral, specialisms that are covered by one section or another of the book and this will become, therefore, a resource volume for many people.

The more we get to know God, the more we want to know him better.

God's love in John 3:16 is not amazing because the world is so big, but because the world is so bad.

When we suffer, there will sometimes be mystery. Will there also be faith? Yes, if our attention is focused more on the cross, and on the God of the cross, than on the suffering itself.

You get into theological education and you're busy marking papers and getting into administration in raising funds and doing all the things that are part of life, but here we were talking about important theological, historical, gospel related, biblically centered things hour after hour after hour.

God is absolutely sovereign, but his sovereignty never mitigates human responsibility.

Good praying is more easily caught than taught.

Prayer is God's appointed means for appropriating the blessings that are ours in Christ Jesus.

What the Bible says is what God has disclosed and we want to approach this sacred text with cognitive reverence.

Unchecked, the new tolerance will sooner or later put many people in chains.

To assume the gospel in one generation is to lose it in the next.

The heart of all idolatry in the Bible is the de-godding of God.

In every generation there are voices that question the authority of Scripture. So in one sense this is merely part of the continuing stream. But there's a sense in which the questions that are raised against Scripture vary a wee bit from generation to generation.

Sex is about timing. The world says: any time, any place. God says: my time, my place.

When we suffer, there will sometimes be mystery... Will there also be faith?

You cannot find excellent corporate worship until you stop trying to find excellent corporate worship and pursue God himself.

Some have argued that the Christian notion of Scripture is not epistemologically sustainable. It's not philosophically possible with rigor to uphold the Christian understanding of Scripture.

The truth of the matter is that all we have to do is live long enough and we will suffer.

To God on whom we rely knows what suffering is all about- not merely in the way that God knows everything, but by experience.

For the far higher task of teaching fortitude and patience I was never fool enough to suppose myself qualified, nor have I anything to offer my readers except my conviction that when pain is to be borne, a little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all.

Some forms of absolutism are not bad; they may even be heroic.

God's wrath is not an implacable, blind rage. However emotional it may be, it is an entirely reasonable and willed response to offenses against his holiness. But his love . . . wells up amidst his perfections and is not generated by the loveliness of the loved. Thus there is nothing intrinsically impossible about wrath and love being directed toward the same individual or people at the same time. God in his perfections must be wrathful against his rebel image-bearers, for they have offended him; God in his perfections must be loving toward his rebel image-bearers, for he is that kind of God

The more clearly we see sins horror, the more we shall treasure the cross.

Damn all false dichotomies to hell

Christianity does not claim to convey merely religious truth, but truth about all reality. This vision of reality is radically different from a secularist vision that wants Christianity to scuttle into the corner of the hearth by the coal shovel, conveniently out of the way of anything but private religious concerns

So there are all kinds of things that grammarian purists would argue are awkward forms of speech and sometimes they are intentional for rhetorical effect and sometimes it's the way people chose to write at the time. Inerrancy isn't interested in any of those kinds of things.

Our prayers may be an index of how small and self-centered our world is.

One cannot fail to observe a crushing irony: the gospel of relativistic tolerance is perhaps the most “evangelistic” movement in Western culture at the moment, demanding assent and brooking no rivals.

If it is hard to accept a rebuke, even a private one, it is harder still to administer one in loving humility.

The New Testament writers I think conceive of their inspired Scripture writings as flushing out, bringing to articulation, expounding and so on the climactic revelation in the son, but this in self-conscious fulfillment of the promises and covenants that were already made to God's chosen people in Old Testament times.

The important thing, Jesus is saying (in Matthew 5:33-37), is to tell the truth and keep one's pledges without insisting that a certain form of words must be used if it is to be binding. No oath is necessary for the truthful person... Their word is so reliable that nothing more than a statement is needed from them.

A weak understanding of what the Bible says about sin is tied to a weak understanding of what the Bible says is achieved by the cross.

To worship God 'in spirit and in truth' is first and foremost a way of saying that we must worship God by means of Christ. In him the reality has dawned and the shadows are being swept away (Hebrews 8:13). Christian worship is new covenant worship; it is gospel-inspired worship; it is Christ-centered worship; it is cross-focused worship.

Not all Scripture is propositional, some of it is asking questions, some of it's rhetorical, but where Scripture is stating something, asserting something, making a truth claim, uttering a proposition that is claiming to be true, it is the truth.

Failure to believe stems from moral failure to recognize the truth, not from want of evidence, but from willful neglect or distortion of the evidence.

Study Bibles tend to circulate widely, so they play a disproportionate role in helping Christians and others understand holy Scripture. Further, many of our members have long used one or two other Study Bibles, and it is important that Christians not be tied too tightly to only one option, however good it may be.

Systematic theology will ask questions like "What are the attributes of God? What is sin? What does the cross achieve?" Biblical theology tends to ask questions such as "What is the theology of the prophecy of Isaiah? What do we learn from John's Gospel? How does the theme of the temple work itself out across the entire Bible?" Both approaches are legitimate; both are important. They are mutually complementary.

The truth of the matter is that inerrancy is simply a way of saying that there are no errors that call into question the truthfulness of Scripture wherever Scripture is making truth claims.

It's better to emphasize biblical theology, partly because there are fine Study Bibles already available that lean into systematic theology, and partly because biblical theology is particularly strong at helping readers see how the Bible hangs together in its own categories: that is, God in his infinite wisdom chose to give us his Word in the 66 canonical books, with all of their variations in theme, emphasis, vocabulary, literary form, and distinctive contributions across time.

Most good evangelical Study Bibles have more in common than people sometimes realize. All of them are committed to explaining the Bible to lay readers.

Ordinary Bibles often include cross-references and brief concordances; Study Bibles include much more, all bound up in one fat volume, so that readers can find a lot of useful explanation on each page without having to hunt through Bible dictionaries and commentaries and the like.

The notion of the enduring authority focuses on the fact that some people think that notions like authority of Scripture's is passé, while others say that the present configuration of the doctrine of inerrancy is a late addition. And to both we want to say, No we're talking about the enduring authority of Scripture, grounded first and foremost in its relevatory status, something given by God and utterly reliable.

"Study Bible" is the expression used for Bibles that include significant explanatory notes, usually at the bottom of the page, sometimes in the margins. Often a Study Bible will also include some brief articles, photographs of geographical and archaeological sites, fairly extensive maps, and charts that summarize a lot of information.

People do not drift toward Holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.

If God had perceived that our greatest need was economic, he would have sent an economist. If he had perceived that our greatest need was entertainment, he would have sent us a comedian or an artist. If God had perceived that our greatest need was political stability, he would have sent us a politician. If he had perceived that our greatest need was health, he would have sent us a doctor. But he perceived that our greatest need involved our sin, our alienation from him, our profound rebellion, our death; and he sent us a Savior.

The aim is never to become a master of the Word, but to be mastered by it.