Terryl Givens Quotes

#1. Joseph Smith, and this is not always fully appreciated within the tradition he initiated, did not feel that direct communication from God, gifts of seership, and an open, continuously expanding canon in any way obviated the need for theology.

Terryl L. Givens

#2. God resides most strongly and evidently where science has not yet progressed to go ... And if this is true then it follows that God resides everywhere and in everything.

Terryl L. Givens

#3. The scriptures, said Paul to Timothy, are given for "correction" and "instruction in righteousness."3 They are likened by the Psalmist to a lamp that illuminates, that lights our path.4 Scriptures beckon, inspire, and edify.

Terryl L. Givens

#4. There are many kinds of silences and not all signify absence or vacancy....Those moments are but temporary ebbs before the flow of meaning rushes in to fill the space....God may be speaking 'in ways we have yet to recognize as speech.

Terryl L. Givens

#5. Voltaire, To believe in God is impossible; but not to believe is absurd.

Terryl L. Givens

#6. Holiness is found in how we treat others, not in how we contemplate the cosmos.

Terryl L. Givens

#7. A God without body or parts is conceivable. But a God without passions would engender in our hearts neither love nor interest.

Terryl Givens

#8. Wherefore I dare not, I, put forth my hand To hold the Ark, although it seem to shake Through th' old sinnes and new doctrines of our land. Onely, since God doth often vessels make Of lowly matter for high uses meet, I throw me at his feet. - George Herbert1

Terryl L. Givens

#9. If we linger in indecision, as does Buridan's beast, we will not perish. We will simply miss an opportunity to act decisively in the absence of certainty, and show that our fear of error is greater than our love of truth.

Terryl Givens

#10. A supreme deity would no more gift us with intellect and expect us to forsake it in moments of bafflement, than He would fashion us eyes to see and bid us shut them to the stars

Terryl L. Givens

#11. What we are worshipping we are becoming. Every moment of every day our choices enact our loves, our desires, and our aspirations. And we are molding ourselves into the God or gods we thereby worship.

Terryl L. Givens

#12. Dante thought a state of eternal, rapturous contemplation, and few have proffered more specifics than that. Post-redemption theology seems an oxymoron.

Terryl L. Givens

#13. Heaven is not a club we enter. Heaven is a state we attain, in accordance with our "capacity to receive" a blessed and sanctified nature.

Terryl L. Givens

#14. God is not exempt from emotional pain ... One the contrary, God's pain is as infinite as His love.

Terryl L. Givens

#15. The English historian Thomas Carlyle defined a person's religion as the set of values evident in his or her actions, regardless of what the individual would claim to believe when asked.

Terryl L. Givens

#16. The Atonement is not a backup plan in case we happen to fall short in the process; it is the ordained means whereby we gradually become complete and whole, in a sin-strewn process of sanctification through which our Father patiently guides us.

Terryl L. Givens

#17. I SHALL know why, when time is over, And I have ceased to wonder why; Christ will explain each separate anguish In the fair schoolroom of the sky. He will tell me what Peter promised, And I, for wonder at his woe, I shall forget the drop of anguish That scalds me now, that scalds me now.

Terryl L. Givens

#18. As Flannery O'Connor wrote, "Religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it's a cross."13

Terryl L. Givens

#19. Beauty, he found, comes with the exercise of freedom within

Terryl L. Givens

#20. His desires are set upon the whole human family, not upon a select few. He is not predisposed to just the fast learners, the naturally inclined, or the morally gifted.

Terryl L. Givens

#21. Relationships are the core of our existence because they are the core of God's and we are in His image.

Terryl L. Givens

#22. The gospel Christ taught was spectacularly designed to unsettle and disturb, not lull into pleasant serenity.

Terryl L. Givens

#23. Life's most wrenching choices are not between right and wrong but between competing demands on our time, our resources, our love and loyalty.

Terryl L. Givens

#24. As surely as the dark gives meaning to the dawn, so does pain give meaning to pleasure, and sorrow to joy. All that we love, all that we strive for, all that we relish, we know only by contrast.

Terryl Givens

#25. Faith is lived, not thought.

Terryl L. Givens

#26. our present relationships are both the laboratory in which we labor to perfect ourselves and the source of that enjoyment that will constitute our true heaven.

Terryl L. Givens

#27. What is always at stake in any decision we make is what that choice turns us into.

Terryl L. Givens

#28. In God's garden, we will continue to blossom differently. And in that difference, we find a chemistry and a harmony, a spark across the gap, that consumes us all.

Terryl L. Givens

#29. Matter and spirit are of equal duration; both are self-existent, - they never began to exist.

Terryl L. Givens

#30. The most terrifying specter that haunts the modern psyche is not death or disease or nuclear annihilation. It is loneliness.

Terryl L. Givens

#31. If we are co-eternal with God, then it is not God's creation of the human out of nothing that defines our essential relationship to him. It is His freely made choice to inaugurate and sustain loving relationships, and our choice to reciprocate, that are at the core of our relationship to the Divine.

Terryl L. Givens

#32. It is only with hindsight that we can see the paradigms of the past for the intellectual straitjackets they were.

Terryl L. Givens

#33. led. On one occasion, he said emphatically, "I don't want you

Terryl L. Givens

#34. In the vision of Enoch, we find ourselves drawn to a God who prevents all the pain He can, assumes all the suffering He can, and weeps over the misery He can neither prevent nor assume.

Terryl L. Givens

#35. What we choose to embrace, to be responsive to, is the purest reflection of who we are and what we love.

Terryl L. Givens

#36. Those mortals who operate in the grey area between conviction and incredulity are in a position to choose most meaningfully, and with most meaningful consequences [ ... ] Perhaps only a doubter can appreciate the miracle of life without end.

Terryl L. Givens

#37. We humans have a lamentable tendency to spend more time theorizing the reasons behind human suffering, than working to alleviate human suffering.

Terryl L. Givens

#38. Our minds are driven to answer questions that far transcend the bounds of our own lives.

Terryl L. Givens

#39. The first and fundamental principle of our holy religion" to be free "to embrace all, and every item of truth, without limitation or without being circumscribed or prohibited by the creeds or superstitious notions of men, or by the dominations of one another.

Terryl L. Givens

#40. God is part of the universe, master architect but not master magician. In this conception, miracles do not represent, as they traditionally have, "the intervention of God in the natural order" or "the suspension of the natural order."10

Terryl L. Givens

#41. Heaven is a condition and a sanctified nature toward which all godly striving tends; it is not a place to be found by walking through the right door with a heavenly hall pass.

Terryl L. Givens