Quotes by D.A. Carson
D.A. Carson (b. 1946) — Neutestamentler, Theologieprofessor und Autor · Evangelikal / Reformierter Baptist · Kanada
Der kanadische Neutestamentler Donald Arthur Carson (* 1946) lehrte über vier Jahrzehnte an der Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in den USA und ist Mitgründer des Netzwerks The Gospel Coalition. Er steht für eine reformiert-baptistische Theologie, biblische Irrtumslosigkeit sowie detaillierte Exegese und trat publizistisch als scharfer Kritiker liberaler und postmodern-relativistischer Strömungen auf. Bibellesern bietet sein Werk fundierte konservative Kommentare und theologische Orientierung, während andere Stimmen seine hermeneutische Unnachgiebigkeit kritisieren.
Era: Today
Recurring topics: God, Jesus & the Holy Spirit, Grace & Redemption, Growth & Character, Discipleship, Humility & Pride, Love, Wisdom & Understanding, Faith & Trust
Quotes by D.A. Carson
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.
D.A. Carson
Most of us go through life worried that people think too little of us. Paul was worried that people thought too highly of him.
D.A. Carson
The Gospel is the “good news” of what God has done in Christ. It is not your response to it.
D.A. Carson
In the darkest night of the soul, Christians have something to hold on to that Job never knew. We know Christ crucified.
D.A. Carson
All of us would be wiser if we would resolve never to put people down, except on our prayer lists.
D.A. Carson
If it is hard to accept a rebuke, even a private one, it is harder still to administer one in loving humility.
D.A. Carson
The place where God has supremely destroyed all human arrogance and pretension is the cross.
D.A. Carson
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.
D.A. Carson
Those who know where the treasure lies joyfully abandon everything else to secure it.
D.A. Carson
Only when we understand the effects of sin does Christ's work on the cross become spectacularly good news.
D.A. Carson
As Christians grow in holy living, they sense their own inherent moral weakness and rejoice that whatever virtue they possess flourishes as the fruit of the Spirit.
D.A. Carson
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.
D.A. Carson
The most extraordinary things about the biblical prerequisites for elders is that they are not all that extraordinary.
D.A. Carson
The most fundamental reason Jesus Christ went to the cross is not His love for us (though that is true), but rather His desire to obey His Father’s will.
D.A. Carson
Whoever has a low view of sin will also have a low view of the cross.
D.A. Carson
God is less interested in answering our questions than in other things: securing our allegiance, establishing our faith, nurturing a desire for holiness.
D.A. Carson
The miracles Jesus performs…do not compel faith; but those with faith will perceive their significance.
D.A. Carson
Spiritual one-upmanship is not a Christian virtue. Persistent negativism is fertile soil for arrogance.
D.A. Carson
No voluntary act of spiritual discipline is ever to become an occasion for self-promotion. Otherwise, any value to the act is utterly vitiated.
D.A. Carson
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.
D.A. Carson
Wrath, unlike love, is not one of the intrinsic perfections of God. Rather, it is a function of God’s holiness against sin. Where there is no sin, there is no wrath-but there will always be love in God. Where God in His holiness confronts His image-bearers in their rebellion, there must be wrath, or God is not the jealous God He claims to be, and His holiness is impugned. The price of diluting God’s wrath is diminishing God’s holiness.
D.A. Carson
Only too easily we read inherited traditional views into the biblical text.
D.A. Carson
If we do not tie our opinions, values, and ways of thinking to the teachings of the Bible, we know neither what the authority of the Bible means, nor what submission to the rule of Jesus Christ means.
D.A. Carson
In the first garden “Not Your will but mine” [by Adam] changed Paradise to desert and brought man from Eden to Gethsemane. Now “Not My will but Yours” [by Jesus Christ] brings anguish to the Man who prays it but transforms the desert into the kingdom and brings man from Gethsemane to the gates of glory.
D.A. Carson
[Repentance] is not a merely intellectual change of mind or mere grief, still less doing penance, but a radical transformation of the entire person, a fundamental turnaround involving mind and action and including overtones of grief, which result in (spiritual) fruit.
D.A. Carson
We don’t drift into spiritual life; we do not drift into disciplined prayer. We do not grow in prayer unless we plan to pray. That means we must set aside time to do nothing but pray. What we actually do reflects our highest priorities. That means that we can proclaim our commitment to prayer until the cows come home, but unless we actually pray, our actions disown our words
D.A. Carson
If you keep burning the candle at both ends, sooner or later you will indulge in more and more mean cynicism – and the line between cynicism and doubt is a very thin one. Of course, different individuals require different numbers of hours of sleep: moreover, some cope with a bit of tiredness better than others. Nevertheless, if you are among those who become nasty, cynical, or even full of doubt when you are missing your sleep, you are morally obligated to try to get the sleep you need. We are whole, complicated beings; our physical existence is tied to our spiritual well-being, to our mental outlook, to our relationships with others, including our relationship with God. Sometimes the godliest thing you can do in the universe is get a good night’s sleep – not pray all night, but sleep. I’m certainly not denying that there may be a place for praying all night; I’m merely insisting that in the normal course of things, spiritual discipline obligates you get the sleep your body needs.
D.A. Carson
We are lost when human opinion means more to us than God's.
D.A. Carson
Christians claim to have the truth, and to follow Him who is the Truth (John 14:6). In our conversations, therefore, truth must be our watchword. How many of us stoop to telling stories with a reprehensible slant, either to make our point more emphatically or to present ourselves in a mere glamorous light than the raw facts will allow? How many of us say we will do things and instead renege on these responsibilities because it is personally inconvenient to go through with them? You who with me are teachers and preachers – how often do we fudge the evidence to make a point, or dogmatize in areas where we know nothing, in the hope that dogma will mask our ignorance? I am not speaking of the honest mistake, but of deceit.
D.A. Carson
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 (Phil. 4:8).
D.A. Carson
John’s point in 1 John 4, “God is love,” is that those who really do know God come to love that way too. Doubtless we do not do it very well, but aren’t Christians supposed to love the unlovable-even our enemies? Because the Gospel has transformed us, our love is to be self-originating, not elicited by the loveliness of the loved. For that is the way it is with God. He loves because love is one of His perfections, in perfect harmony with all His other perfections.
D.A. Carson
A saying is neither a promise nor a precedent.
D.A. Carson
We will improve our exegetical skills step by step if we study the Bible without bias and are determined, in reverence and prayer, to become a worker who 'rightly handles the word of truth.'
D.A. Carson
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.
D.A. Carson
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-breakers, for they have offended Him; God in His perfections must be loving toward His rebel image-bearers, for He is that kind of God.
D.A. Carson
All of God’s emotions, including His love in all its aspects, cannot be divorced from God’s knowledge, God’s power, God’s will. If God loves, it is because He chooses to love; if He suffers, it is because He chooses to suffer. God is impassible in the sense that He sustains no “passion,” no emotion, that makes Him vulnerable from the outside, over which He has no control, or which He has not foreseen.
D.A. Carson
Jesus’ balance mirrored the balance of Scripture: He could simultaneously denounce the cities that did not repent and praise the God who does not reveal; for God’s sovereignty in election is not mitigated by man’s stubbornness and sin, while man’s responsibility is in no way diminished by God’s “good pleasure” that sovereignty reveals and conceals (Mt. 11:25-26).
D.A. Carson
Prayer is the product of [our] passion for people… Unaffected fervency in prayer is not whipped-up emotionalism but the overflow of [our] love for brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus. That means that if we are to improve our praying, we must strengthen our loving. As we grow in disciplined, self-sacrificing love, so we will grow in intercessory prayer. Superficially fervent prayers devoid of such love are finally phony, hollow, shallow.
D.A. Carson
The coming of God’s reign either demands repentance or brings judgment.
D.A. Carson
There has not only been an objective, public act of divine self-disclosure in the crucifixion of God’s own Son, but there must be a private work of God by His Spirit, in the mind and heart of the individual. If we should express unqualified gratitude to God for the gift of His Son, we should express no less gratitude for the gift of the Spirit who enables us to grasp the gospel of His Son…Unless the Spirit enlightens us, God’s thoughts will remain deeply alien to us.
D.A. Carson
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Sources: wikipedia.org, wordpress.com, samstorms.org
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