Top 37 Church Fathers Sayings
#1. As the early church fathers delighted in saying, Christ took what was ours so that we might receive what was His.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#2. The Christian test was a willingness to believe in the one Jesus Christ and His Message of salvation. What was demanded was not criticism but credulity. The Church Fathers observed that in the realm of thought only heresy had a history.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#3. The Alexandrian School In opposition to the previously named Church Fathers, the Alexandrians openly embraced Greek philosophy, thought of it as being of divine origin, and brought its allegorizing technique into their exegesis.
Anonymous
#4. The greatest Church Fathers, for instance, took it for granted that the creation narratives of Genesis could not be treated literally,
David Bentley Hart
#5. Our New Testament text of today is a reconstructed or restored text. It has been reconstructed by modern scholarship from three independent lines of witnesses: the manuscripts, the versions, and the writings of early Christians (Church Fathers). In
Neil R. Lightfoot
#6. The Church Fathers teach us that a shattered heart is the most pleasing gift to God. It is the sign that we are conscious of our sins, of the evil we have done, of our wretchedness, and of our need for forgiveness and mercy.
Pope Francis
#7. Fierce invectives against women form a conspicuous and grotesque portion of the writings of the Church fathers.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky
#8. I hate Science. It denies a man's responsibility for his own deeds, abolishes the brotherhood that springs from God's fatherhood. It is a hectoring, dictating expertise, which makes the least lovable of the Church Fathers seem liberal by contrast.
Basil Bunting
#9. If I repeated some passages from the homilies of the Church Fathers, in the second or third century, about how we must treat the poor, some would accuse me of giving a Marxist homily.
Pope Francis
#10. I'm now reading Tertullian, Cyprian, and others of the church fathers with great interest. In some ways they are more relevant to our time than the Reformers, and at the same time they provide a basis for talks between Protestants and Roman Catholics.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#11. Mainstream rabbis essentially closed the book on dreams by the sixth century, and Church fathers established that only certain saints have the discernment to determine which dreams are from God. The dream is exiled.
Rodger Kamenetz
#12. Another thing I liked about my Dad at church: he did his sleeping at home. He never used the church as an adult nursery.
Vance Havner
#13. [Our] plan is to follow the example of the prophets and the ancient fathers of the church, and to compose psalms ... so that the Word of God may be among the people also in the form of music.
Martin Luther
#14. Our fathers founded the first secular government that was ever founded in this world. Recollect that. The first secular government - the first government that said every church has exactly the same rights and no more; every religion has the same rights, and no more.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#15. Hence forms of social production that preceded the bourgeois form, are treated by the bourgeoisie in much the same way as the Fathers of the Church treated pre-Christian religions.[46]
Karl Marx
#16. If the bookseller happens to desire a privilege for his merchandise, whether he is selling Rabelais or the Fathers of the Church, the magistrate grants the privilege without answering for the contents of the book. - Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire
Voltaire
#17. Various Eastern fathers referred to the practice of married priests in their churches, offering each one of us elements for a further careful evaluation of the choice of the Latin church to connect celibacy to ordained priesthood.
Angelo Scola
#18. If anyone in word and mind does not properly and truly confess according to the holy Fathers all even to the last portion that which has been handed down and preached in the holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church of God ... let him be anathema.
Pope Martin I
#19. Cuban agents are assigned to a Catholic Church where their instructions are to beat, jail and intimidate the Ladies In White that attend Mass and who afterwards peacefully take to the streets calling for the release of their husbands, sons and fathers who are political prisoners.
Marco Rubio
#20. AT LEAST THREE YEARS ago, my fathers God stopped being my God. His church stopped being my church. And yet, today, because I'm a coward, I let myself be initiated into that church. I let my father baptize me in all three names of that God who isn't mine any more. My God has another name.
Octavia E. Butler
#21. No one can have God for his Father, who has not the Church for his mother.
Cyprian
#22. To all fathers and mothers of the Church, tell your children that you love them and that you are so happy to have them in your family.
Patricia P. Pinegar
#23. The Fathers of the Church were not afraid to go out into the desert because they had a richness in their hearts. But we, with richness all around us, are afraid, because the desert is in our hearts.
Franz Kafka
#24. New revelations regarding faith or morals ... have always been abhorred and challenged in the Church ... Hence, the Sovereign Pontiffs, the Councils, and the Fathers have been most careful to reject all novelties or new doctrines on matters of faith which differed from those already received.
Alphonsus Liguori
#25. The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers. On the contrary, our Founders' political views were strongly informed by their religious beliefs.
Ron Paul
#26. Thomas Jefferson declared, stating that he was speaking on behalf of the other founding fathers, ... (that) we should build a wall between the church and state.
Jimmy Carter
#27. Have you by any chance an edition of St. Ignatius's treatise against the Gnostics?" he asked in a low clear voice.
The young assistant looked gravely back. "Not for sale, I'm afraid," he said. "Nor, if it comes to that, the Gnostic treatises against St. Ignatius."
"Quite," Anthony answered.
Charles Williams
#28. Why cast yourself over a cliff, deciding in your writings about things of which you are ignorant? Why do you not keep to what you have received from the Fathers and Doctors of the Church? You introduce novelties!
Eusebius
#29. A monk was told that his father had died. He said to the messenger, "Do not blaspheme. My Father cannot die.
Benedicta Ward
#30. Here Carlyle had come, here George Eliot had progressed through the bookshelves. Roland could see her black silk skirts, her velvet trains, sweeping compressed between the Fathers of the Church, and heard her firm foot ring on metal among the German poets.
A.S. Byatt
#31. So the worthless rose up against the honoured, those of no reputation against such as were renowned, the foolish against the wise, the young against those advanced in years.
The Church Fathers
#32. I urge the husbands and fathers of this church to be the kind of a man your wife would not want to be without.
James E. Faust
#33. here George Eliot had progressed through the bookshelves. Roland saw her black silk skirts, her velvet trains, sweeping compressed between the Fathers of the Church, and heard her firm foot ring on metal among the German poets. Here
A.S. Byatt
#34. Boys did not go to work on the railroad simply because their fathers did. What fetched them were sights and sounds of moving trains, and above all the whistle of a locomotive. I've heard of the call of the wild, the call of the law, the call of the church. There is also the call of the railroad.
Gary Krist
#35. Give me liberty or give me death.
[From a speech given at Saint John's Church in Richmond, Virginia on March 23, 1775 to the Virginia House of Burgesses; as first published in print in 1817 in William Wirt's Life and Character of Patrick Henry.]
Patrick Henry
#37. English churchmen have long gazed with love on the primitive church as the ideal of Christian perfection, the Eden wherein the first fathers of their faith walked blameless before God and passionless towards each other.
Sabine Baring-Gould
