Elie Wiesel Quotes

Pastors need to know what's going on in the world and what has been going on for 4,000 years. We need a way to read Scripture which is imaginative, interpretive.

I think evangelicals would do better if they concentrated less on bolstering the formal authority of the Scripture - which I certainly would want to affirm - and more on displaying how biblical texts can shape lives in salutary ways, how they are fruitful texts, how they are texts one can live according to.

I've done some analysis of the biblical stories as part of my psychological work. I knew that I had more to do, and every time I've done it, it's been extremely valuable. It makes me a better teacher because I have a richer understanding of cultural history.

My aim has been to expound Scripture and to expound Scripture in such a way that I do not set one Scripture over against another.

What the Latins have done in this text (1 John v, 7) the Greeks have done to Paul (1 Tim. iii, 16). They now read, "Great is the mystery of godliness; God manifest in the flesh"; whereas all the churches for the first four or five hundred years, and the authors of all the ancient versions, Jerome as well as the rest, read, "Great is the mystery of godliness, which was manifest in the flesh." Our English version makes it yet a little stronger. It reads, "Great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh."

Funny but, for me, the Bible was a hobby before it was a serious study. It was the thing I'd sneak off and do on the side, feeling rather guilty because I wasn't doing my real school homework or whatever... and never thinking I would make it a life's work.

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.

The Old and New Testaments are the Great Code of Art.

A man who would interpret the scriptures must have the spiritual discipline.

Revelation: a famous book in which St. John the Divine concealed all that he knew. The revealing is done by the commentators, who know nothing.

It is quite possible that we can do greater things than Jesus, for what is written in the Bible about him is poetically embellished.

The principle rule of interpreting Scripture is that Scripture interprets Scripture.

The lives of the saints are the hermeneutical key to Scripture.

The apple . . . came before Adam and Eve in the story of creation. It had to have been there at least three years because that's how long it takes for a new tree to bear fruit.

Civilization just takes it as a given that the whole world was flooding. Then science came and you had geology and modern astrophysics, and time became well understood going back billions of years. So enlightened religious people, as a necessity, had to shed the magical elements of the Bible. A little known fact is that Thomas Jefferson did just that. There's something called the Jefferson Bible. It's not widely publicized because it sort of conflicts with certain people's ideas of what the founding fathers were.

Of all the commentaries on the Scriptures, good examples are the best.

There are some wonderful aspects to Christmas. It's magical. And each year, from at least November, well, September, well, if I'm honest, May, I look forward to it hugely.

The trouble with Jim was he looked at the world and could not look away. And when you never look away all your life, by the time you are thirteen you have done twenty years taking in the laundry of the world.

You're always a bit blind. If you look at stuff a few years later, you get a more objective look at it.

All of Scripture is for us but not all of Scripture is to us.

If anybody had shown me the paperwork for how my life was going to look in five years, I would have said, "No. That is not where I want to go."

The fact that so little of the findings of modern science is prefigured in Scripture to my mind casts further doubt on it divine inspiration.

This happens to me every couple of years. I'll look at someone I respect and I'll realize that he's outworking me. It changes the way I behave for the next half decade.

The Scripture says that He, the Lord, came walking in the Temple, with His train; I do not know who they were, unless His wives and children; but at any rate they filled the Temple, and how many there were who could not get into the Temple I cannot say. This is the account given by Isaiah, whether he told the truth or not I leave every body to judge for himself.

The Southern Baptist Convention, as you know, decided in the year 2000 that women should not be permitted to be pastors or deacons or chaplains in the military service. Some Southern Baptist seminaries don't even permit women to teach male students. I don't agree with that. But they can go in and quote a few passages of Paul that women should be restricted in their services.