William Gt Shedd Quotes

error in a believer has more influence within the church than error in an unbeliever has.

A ship is safe in harbor, but that is not what ships are for.  William GT Shedd (1820 -94)

if there be no love of righteousness, there is no anger at sin, and, conversely, if there be no anger at sin, there is no love of righteousness.

A ship is safe in harbor, but that's not what ships are for. – William G.T. Shedd

Because God has originated the power’s and capacities of a creature from nothing, he is entitled to all the agency of these faculties without paying for it; as the artificer of a watch is entitled to all the motion of the watch, without coming under obligation to the watch. Even this comparison is inadequate; for the maker of the watch did not create the materials out of which it is made. But God creates the very substance itself out of which man’s faculties of mind and body are made.

A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for.” -William G.T. Shedd

A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for. William G.T. Shedd

No idea so impresses universal man as the idea of God. Neither space nor time, neither matter nor mind, neither life nor death, not sun, moon or stars, so influence the immediate consciousness of man in every clime, and in all his generations, as does that presence that in Wordsworth’s phrase “is not to be put by “ This idea of ideas overhangs human existence like the firmament, and though clouds and darkness obscure it in many zones, while in others it is crystalline and clear, all human beings must live beneath it and cannot possibly get from under its all-embracing arch.

Whenever a man deliberately ventures upon an action which he knows that religion prohibits, he tacitly reiects religion. There may not pass in this thoughts every step which we have described nor may he come consciously to the conclusion: but he acts upon the conclusion, he practically adopts it. And the doing so will alienate his mind from religion as surely, almost, as if he had formally argued himself into an opinion of its untruth. The effect of sin is necessarily and highly and in all cases adverse to the production and existence of religious faith.

While this method is interesting because it makes sin and salvation the principal theme and brings Christ the Redeemer into the foreground, yet it is neither a natural nor a logical method. God incarnate is only a single person of the Godhead; redemption is only one of the works of God; and sin is an anomaly in the universe, not an original and necessary fact. The christological method, therefore, is fractional. It does not cover the whole ground. It is preferable to construct theological science upon the Trinity—to begin with the trinal nature and existence of the Godhead and then come down to his acts in incarnation and redemption. It is not logical or natural to build a science upon one of its divisions. Christology is a division in theology.

The proper mode of discussing any single theological topic is exegetical and rational. The first step to be taken is to deduce the doctrine itself from Scripture by careful exegesis; and the second step is to justify and defend this exegetical result upon grounds of reason.