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Welcome to StephenBarkley.com. This is where I post all the stuff I've been thinking, praying, speaking, and writing about. Thanks for reading.
People are so ready to think themselves changed when it is only their mood that is changed! Those who are good-tempered because it is a fine day, will be ill-tempered when it rains: their selves are just the same both days; only in the one case, the fine weather has got into them, in the [...]
No question can penetrate behind God creating, because it is impossible to go behind the beginning. —Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall and Temptation: Two Biblical Studies, 201.
Agape is related to Eros, as Mozart to Beethoven. How could they possibly be confused? —Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology, 201.
One must learn not only to recite the words of Holy Scripture by rote but also to believe them with one’s heart and to remain steadfast in times of peril and in the hour of death. —Martin Luther, Luther’s Works Vol. 22: Sermons on the Gospel of St. John Chapters 1-4, 258.
God’s grace is powerful enough to give even a man’s impure heart, hesitant will, weak head, and bad conscience the capacity to ask and answer meaningfully with respect to God and his work and word. —Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology, 168.
Theological work cannot be done on any level or in any respect other than by freely granting the free God room to dispose at will over everything that men may already have known, produced, and achieved, and over all the religious, moral, intellectual, spiritual, or divine equipage with which men have traveled. —Karl Barth, Evangelical [...]
The gospel message is precisely an invitation and authorization to be freed from all … distorting, coercive pressures: to be freely and completely Yahweh’s own people, freed to live a life of unfettered worship, assured not only of safety from threat but assured of Yahweh’s own person, who is the true joy of life. —Walter [...]
God created us in joy and created us for joy, and in the long run not all the darkness there is in the world and in ourselves can separate us finally from that joy, because whatever else it means to say that God created us in his image, I think it means that even when [...]
Faith is the engagement ring which betroths us to Christ. —Martin Luther, Luther’s Works: Sermons on the Gospel of St. John Chapters 1-4, 334.
Right belief is the necessary condition for right action, not the other way round. —Robert Barron, Catholicism: A Journey to the Heart of the Faith, 22.
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