quotations about redemption
In the end, it is our defiance that redeems us. If wolves had a religion -- if there was a religion of the wolf -- that it is what it would tell us.
MARK ROWLANDS
The Philosopher and the Wolf: Lessons from the Wild on Love, Death, and Happiness
It should raise wonder in us when we consider God's power and goodness in the work of creation; but when we consider the work of redemption, it should raise our wonder to an ecstasy.
EZEKIEL HOPKINS
The Works of the Right Reverend Father in God, Ezekiel Hopkins
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery;
None but ourselves can free our minds.
Have no fear for atomic energy,
'Cause none of them can stop the time.
How long shall they kill our prophets,
While we stand aside and look? Ooh!
Some say it's just a part of it:
We've got to fulfill the book.
BOB MARLEY
"Redemption Song"
It is his capacity for self-improvement and self-redemption which most distinguishes man from the mere brute.
AUNG SAN SUU KYI
Freedom from Fear
It is very probable, if not evident, that as Christ took on him the work of Mediator as soon as man fell, so he now immediately began his work of redemption in its effect, encountering his great enemy the devil, whom he had undertaken to conquer, and rescuing those two first captives out of his hands; therein baffling him soon after his triumph over them, whereby he had made them his captives. And though he seemed sure of them and all their posterity, Christ the Redeemer soon showed him that he was mistaken.
JONATHAN EDWARDS
A History of the Work of Redemption: Comprising an Outline of Church History
The sin being there, God elected not to destroy the sinner, but to spare him to be the parent of the children who should work out the problem to the fatal issue, and drink the cup of bitterness which Adam's transgression had mingled for man to the very dregs. That was God's decree. And now imagine that the decree had ended there--that no thought of redemption had entered into the mind of God. How if His decreed had been that men were to be born, generation after generation, to sin and to suffer in an ever-widening circle of corruption and misery; the race rotting morally while multiplying physically, born, nursed, and buried, in an atmosphere of foul and fetid decay. Born, too, to sin and suffer thus by no election of their own, dependent on another's will for their very existence--an existence which must inevitably become a curse to them--a curse which they would never be able to shake off, which would blacken and deepen through eternity. Picture this, it is a vision of horror.
JAMES BALDWIN BROWN
The Divine Treatment of Sin
How much better and more consonant also to our feeling to suppose that there is some antecedent necessity, inherent in the conception of finite and begun existences, that, in their training as powers, they should be passed through the double experience of evil and good, fall and redemption.
HORACE BUSHNELL
Nature and the Supernatural: As Together Constituting the One System of God
I find something repulsive about the idea of vicarious redemption. I would not throw my numberless sins onto a scapegoat and expect them to pass from me; we rightly sneer at the barbaric societies that practice this unpleasantness in its literal form. There's no moral value in the vicarious gesture anyway. As Thomas Paine pointed out, you may if you wish take on a another man's debt, or even to take his place in prison. That would be self-sacrificing. But you may not assume his actual crimes as if they were your own; for one thing you did not commit them and might have died rather than do so; for another this impossible action would rob him of individual responsibility. So the whole apparatus of absolution and forgiveness strikes me as positively immoral, while the concept of revealed truth degrades the concept of free intelligence by purportedly relieving us of the hard task of working out the ethical principles for ourselves.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Letters to a Young Contrarian
O, if there be any kind of life most sad, and deepest in the scale of pity, it is the dry, cold impotence of one, who has honestly set to the work of his own self-redemption.
HORACE BUSHNELL
Nature and the Supernatural: As Together Constituting the One System of God
Why, all the souls that are were forfeit once;
And He that might the vantage best have took
Found out the remedy.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Measure for Measure
We may infer that the work of redemption is the greatest of all God's works of which we have any notice, and it is the end of all his other works.
JONATHAN EDWARDS
A History of the Work of Redemption: Comprising an Outline of Church History
A new dawn. A chance for redemption.
ANONYMOUS
But redemption brings us into a capacity of far greater happiness, than that, from which we fell: it gives us hopes, that, though we lost paradise, we may gain heaven; yea, and assures us, that we shall certainly do so, if we do not wilfully neglect that great salvation, that is purchased for us; and frowardly choose death and our own destruction, before eternal life and joy. So that you see creation is a mercy and blessing to us, chiefly upon the count of redemption; and we are obliged to bless God, that he hath by creation made us subjects capable of that glory and happiness, which he hath prepared for us by redemption.
EZEKIEL HOPKINS
The Works of the Right Reverend Father in God, Ezekiel Hopkins
God has such gladness every time he sees from heaven that a sinner is praying to Him with all his heart, as a mother has when she sees the first smile on her baby's face.
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
The Idiot
The day misspent,
the love misplaced,
has inside it
the seed of redemption.
Nothing is exempt
from resurrection.
KAY RYAN
Say Uncle
The doctrine of redemption is founded on a mere pecuniary idea corresponding to that of a debt which another person might pay; and as this pecuniary idea corresponds again with the system of second redemption, obtained through the means of money given to the Church for pardons, the probability is that the same persons fabricated both the one and the other of those theories; and that, in truth there is no such thing as redemption -- that it is fabulous, and that man stands in the same relative condition with his Maker as he ever did stand since man existed, and that it is his greatest consolation to think so.
THOMAS PAINE
The Age of Reason