March

20 Quotes from The Church Between Temple and Mosque

By

Pierce Taylor Hibbs

WSP PUBLICATION

20 Quotes

"It is possible to believe that religion, by its very nature is a response. It is not just a human characteristic, properly part of our equipment. In his religion, man feels that he is addressed by a supernatural power, that a god reveals and manifests himself to him. Religion is the human answer to divine, or at least allegedly divine, revelation. . . . Religion is never a soliloquy, a dialogue of man with himself. . . . In his religion man is aware that he is not alone, because he knows he is living in the immediate presence of someone who is infinitely greater than he is" (p. 12).

"Not infrequently man seems to flee from the same gods whose communion he seeks and whose blessing he craves" (p. 24).

"Man has the remarkable power to create a certain distance between himself and the cosmos, and to place himself upon a platform from which he looks upon the world as if it were something else. Of course, when he falls from a high rock, or is almost starved to death, or is seriously ill, he is reminded in a rather harsh way of his being only a particle; but as soon as he has regained his strength and his safety, he ascends his throne again and wields the scepter over his world. The world becomes his minion again, the object with which he can play his game" (p. 31).

"Being part of this mysterious universe in which he finds himself, having some notion of the norm which dominates life and of the riddle that he moves between act and fate, and struggling to be saved, man felt that there must be a divine power higher than himself, and he has ever reached for a vision of it" (p. 102).

"Every human life is essentially a choice and a decision. It says something and it does something" (p. 108).

"All questions force themselves upon man as one all-inclusive question: 'Who am I, small mortal man, in the midst of all these powerful realities with which I am confronted and with which my life is most intimately related?' This very simple question reveals all the problems of religion in a nutshell" (p. 109).

"The aerial of man's heart can no longer receive the wave length of God's voice, even though it surrounds him on all sides. But in his innermost heart man has turned away from God and now God has vanished out of his sight" (p. 116).

"Man is made after God's image and in His likeness, and God demands this image back; man must become 'man' again in the full and true sense of the word as God had meant it" (p. 128).

"It strikes us immediately that there is a remarkable analogy between what happens with man and with the cosmos. In this analogy man leads the way—what he does and what happens to him is, as it were, projected on a larger scale and receives cosmic dimensions. But man, who leads the way, must make the pattern of his behavior according to God's activity" (p. 138).

"The penetrating question of God: 'Where art thou?' still lies at the bottom of all human existence. Wandering man, who lost his certainties and could no longer find any meaning in his existence, is still sought by God" (p. 138).

"In the Bible things are only things, but they have a meaning; they are letters in God's speech, they are words in which He expresses His thought and thus their symbolic value far exceeds their intrinsic value" (p. 142).