Sermon quotes on humanity
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
The deepest, the only theme of human history, compared to which all others are to subordinate importance, is the conflict of skepticism with faith.
Irenaeus of Lyon
The glory of God is a human being fully alive
Henry Fairlie
If we acknowledge that our inclination to sin is part of our natures, and that we will never wholly eradicate it, there is at least something for us to do in our lives that will not in the end seem just futile and absurd.
The Seven Deadly Sins Today
Immanuel Kant
Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.
Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose
James K.A. Smith
To be human is to be for something, directed toward something, oriented toward something. To be human is to be on the move, pursuing something, after something.We are like existential sharks; we have to move to live. We are not just static containers for ideas; we are dynamic creatures directed toward some end. In philosophy we have a shorthand term for this: something that is oriented toward an end or telos (a “goal”) is described as teleological.
You are what you Love: the Spiritual Power of Habit
Bob Marley
Truth is, everybody is going to hurt you; you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for.
Eugene Peterson
St. Paul tells us that Jesus Christ, the revelation of God become human, “set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human! Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process. He didn’t claim special privileges. Instead, he lived a selfless, obedient life and then died a selfless, obedient death-and the worst kind of death at that: crucifixion”
Tell it Slant: A Conversation on the Language of Jesus in his Stories and Prayer.
Clay Scroggins
Kurt Vonnegut famously said, “I am a human being, not a human doing.” Vonnegut was an avowed atheist and president of the American Humanist Association, but his observation parallels the orthodox Christian view of how God created us. We were crafted in God’s image to be something before we were given any mandates to do something. This tells us something about GOd., but also says much about how God sees us.
How to Lead When You’re Not in Charge
Eugene Peterson
The Latin words humus, soil/earth, and homo, human being, have a common derivation, from which we also get our word ‘humble.’ This is the Genesis origin of who we are: dust – dust that the Lord God used to make us a human being. If we cultivate a lively sense of our origin and nurture a sense of continuity with it, who knows, we may also acquire humility.
Kurt Vonnegut
I am a human being, not a human doing.
Glen Scrivener
God’s first promise was for the man of heaven to descend and save us. Humanity’s plan is to ascend to heaven and “make a name for ourselves.
Long Story Short: The Bible in 12 Phrases, Christian Focus Publication
Cleanth Brooks
One looks for an image of man, attempting in a world increasingly dehumanized to realize himself as a man—to act like a responsible moral being, not to drift like a mere thing.
The Hidden God, Yale University Press
Taken from E.F. Schumacher
Homo non proprie humanus sed superhumanus est—
To be properly human, you must go beyond the merely human.
A Guide for the Perplexed, Perennial Library.
Ray Bradbury
We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Men are still men, and not keyboards of pianos over which the hands of Nature may play at their own sweet will.
Letters from the Underworld, E. P. Dutton.
James K.A. Smith
…Descartes described us to be: thinking things that are containers for ideas. What if that is actually only a small slice of who we are? And what if that’s not even the most important part? In the rationalist picture, we are not only reduced to primarily thinking things; we are also seen as things whose bodies are nonessential (and rather regrettable) containers for our minds.
Desiring the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation, Baker Publishing Group.
Michael Hardin
The inevitability of the death of Jesus does not stem from God’s need but from humanity’s. There are only two roles to play in the tale of divine and human relationships, persecutor or persecuted. God can cause suffering or God can suffer. God in Christ chose the latter.
Carl Sagan (For Contrast)
Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.
Paul David Tripp
You and I were created for more than filling up our schedules with the self-satisfying pursuits of personal pleasure.
A Quest for More
N.T. Wright
God made humans for a purpose: not simply for themselves, not simply ply so that they could be in relationship with him, but so that through them, as his image-bearers, he could bring his wise, glad, fruitful order der to the world.
Justification: God’s Plan & Paul’s Vision, IVP Press.
James C. Coleman
As the modern day person struggles with the baffling question of his own existence… science falls short of providing full answers… it can tell how, but not why.” Coleman adds, “Despite their fine automobiles, well-stocked refrigerators, and other material possessions and comforts, the meaning of life seems to be evading them. They are suffering from existential anxiety—deep concern about finding values which enable them to live satisfying, fulfilling, meaningful, and [significant] lives.”
Abnormal Psychology in Modern Life, Scott, Foresman and Co.
Nicholas Harnan
This [brokenness] is what needs to be accepted. Unfortunately, this is what we tend to reject. Here the seeds of a corrosive self-hatred take root. This painful vulnerability is the characteristic feature of our humanity that most needs to be embraced in order to restore our human condition to a healed state.
The Heart’s Journey Home: A Quest for Wisdom, Ave Maria Press, 1992.
John O’Donohue
The basic human drive is the desire for the Good.
Martin Luther King Jr.
The whole concept of the “image of God ” is the idea that all men have something within them that God injected. .. . And this gives [man] a uniqueness, it gives him worth, it gives him dignity. And we must never forget this. . . there are no gradations in the image of God. Every man from a treble white to a bass black is significant on God’s keyboard., precisely because every man is made in the image of God. One day we will learn that. We will know one day that God made us to live together as brothers and to respect the dignity and worth of every man.
James C. Coleman
As the modern day person struggles with the baffling question of his own existence… science falls short of providing full answers… it can tell how, but not why.” Coleman adds, “Despite their fine automobiles, well-stocked refrigerators, and other material possessions and comforts, the meaning of life seems to be evading them. They are suffering from existential anxiety—deep concern about finding values which enable them to live satisfying, fulfilling, meaningful, and [significant] lives.”
Abnormal Psychology in Modern Life, Scott, Foresman and Co.
G.K. Chesterton
[I]f we chose to project the human figure forward out of an unhuman world, we could only say that one of the animals had obviously gone mad.
The Everlasting Man, p 52.
G.K. Chesterton
The fact [is] that original sin is really original. Not merely in theology but in history it is a thing rooted in the origins. Whatever else men have believed, they have all believed that there is something the matter with mankind. This sense of sin has made it impossible to be natural and have no clothes, just has it has made it impossible to be natural and have no laws.
The Everlasting Man, p 53.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The one essential condition of human existence is that man should always be able to bow down before something infinitely great. If men are deprived of the infinitely great they will not go on living and die of despair. The Infinite and the Eternal are as essential for man as the little planet on which he dwells.
Clairee Belcher (Olivia Dukakis)
“The only thing that separates us from the animals is our ability to accessorize.”
Steel Magnolias
Robert Benchley
There may be said to be two classes of people in the world; those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes, and those who do not.
Of All Things, 1921
Iris Murdoch
Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself, and then comes to resemble that picture.
“Metaphysics and Ethics,” in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter J. Conradi (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997), 75.
Jacques Maritain
Man is a metaphysical being, an animal that nourishes its life on transcendence.
G.K. Chesterton
The crux and crisis is that man found it natural to worship; even natural to worship unnatural things. . . . If man cannot pray, he is gagged; if he cannot kneel, he is in irons.
The Everlasting Man
J.R.R. Tolkien
We all long for Eden, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most human, is still soaked with the sense of exile.
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
Pope John Paul II
When the sense of God is lost, the sense of man is also threatened and poisoned.
Evangelium Vitae, Vatican.
Jacques Maritain
Man is a metaphysical being, an animal that nourishes its life on transcendence.
E.F. Schumacher
The scholastics used to say: Homo non proprie humanus sed superhumanus est—which means that to be properly human, you must go beyond the merely human.
A Guide for the Perplexed. (New York: Perennial Library, 1977), 38.
John D. Zizioulas
The human being is defined through otherness. It is a being whose identity emerges only in relation to other beings, God, the animals and the rest of creation.
Liuan Huska
Being fully human is to inhabit the wild mysteries of our bodies and trust that, because Christ was a body, and still is a body, we don’t need to fear this place. We can say, it is good, because Christ meets us here.
Taken from Hurting Yet Whole: Reconciling Body and Spirit in Chronic Pain and Illness by Liuan Huska. Copyright (c) 2020 by Liuan Huska. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com.
Dallas Willard
The natural condition of life for human beings is one of reciprocal rootedness in others.
Renovation of the Heart (NavPress, 2002)
Bob Goff
What I’ve come to realize is if I really want to “meet Jesus,” then I have to get a lot closer to the people He created. All of them, not just some of them.
Bruce Waltke
God created [mankind] and therefore only God can reveal to us our identity and function. Without this biblical revelation, we are lost in a maze of confusion.
An Old Testament Theology: An Exegetical, Canonical, and Thematic Approach (Zondervan Academic, 2011)
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