Quotes about Concern

Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of the meaning of our life.

Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned.

Only if God IS ultimate reality, can he be our unconditional concern; only then can he be the object of surrender, obedience, and assent. Faith in anything which has only preliminary reality is idolatrous.

Ordinary theism has made God a heavenly, completely perfect person who resides above the world and mankind. The protest of atheism against such a highest person is correct. There is no evidence for his existence, nor is he a matter of ultimate concern. God is not God without universal participation. "Personal God" is a confusing symbol.

Faith…is a concern of the whole person; it is the most personal concern, and that which determines all others. …it is not something which we can produce by the will to believe, but that by which we are grasped.

Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the meaning of life.

Faith as the state of being ultimately concerned implies love, namely, the desire and urge toward the reunion of the seperated.

I feel that if we do not engage Scripture with future believers in mind, we will unwittingly erect unnecessary and tragic obstacles to belief. Part of what drives this book is my concern to help prevent that scenario.

Now this matter distressed Abraham greatly because it concerned his son Ishmael.

So he asked the officials of Pharaoh who were in custody with him in his master’s house, “Why are your faces so downcast today?”

But Jacob did not send Joseph’s brother Benjamin with his brothers, for he said, “I am afraid that harm might befall him.”

He asked if they were well, and then he asked, “How is your elderly father you told me about? Is he still alive?”