D. Elton Trueblood Quotes

#1. Religion is never devoid of emotion, any more than love is. It is not a defect of religion, but rather its glory, that it speaks always the language of feeling.

D. Elton Trueblood

#2. The spoken word is never really effective unless it is backed up by a life, but it is also true that the living deed is never adequate without the support the spoken word can provide.

D. Elton Trueblood

#3. This historic Christian doctrine of the divinity of Christ does not simply mean that Jesus is like God.
It is far more radical than that. It means that God is like Jesus.

D. Elton Trueblood

#4. It takes a noble man to plant a seed for a tree that will someday give shade to people he may never meet.

D. Elton Trueblood

#5. At the profoundest depths in life, men talk not about God but with Him.

D. Elton Trueblood

#6. Faith is not belief without proof, but trust without reservation.

D. Elton Trueblood

#7. The ultimate verification of our religion consists of the changed lives to which it can point and for which it is responsible.

D. Elton Trueblood

#8. Engineering is a predictive science, not a manipulative art.

D. Elton Trueblood

#9. One of the noblest words in our language is "grace," defined as "unearned blessing." We live by grace far more than by anything else. Accordingly, I find that the one thing which I want to put into practice in my own life is the conscious and deliberate habit of finding someone to thank.

D. Elton Trueblood

#10. The only way to happiness is never to give happiness a thought.

D. Elton Trueblood

#11. No vital Christianity is possible unless at least three aspects of it are developed. These are the inner life of devotion, the outer life of service, and the intellectual life of rationality.

D. Elton Trueblood

#12. The more we study the early Church, the more we realize that it was a society of ministers. About the only similarity between the Church at Corinth and a contemporary congregation, either Roman Catholic or Protestant, is that both are marked, to a great degree, by the presence of sinners.

D. Elton Trueblood

#13. Never trust a theologian who doesn't have a sense of humor.

D. Elton Trueblood

#14. Democracy is necessitated by the fact that all men are sinners; it is made possible by the fact that we know it ...

D. Elton Trueblood

#15. Evangelism is not a professional job for a few trained men, but is instead the unrelenting responsibility of every person who belongs to the company of Jesus.

D. Elton Trueblood

#16. The world is equally shocked at hearing Christianity criticized and seeing it practiced.

D. Elton Trueblood

#17. We need to be agnostics first and then there is some chance at arriving at a sensible system of belief.

D. Elton Trueblood

#18. If the average church should suddenly take seriously the notion that every lay member man or woman is really a minister of Christ, we could have something like a revolution in a very short time.

D. Elton Trueblood

#19. Thoughtful people are concerned with the future because that is the only area of experience about which anything can be done. We cannot change the past, and the present is gone as soon as it is reported, but the future is that in which we can make a difference.

D. Elton Trueblood