Quotes about Reality

Language is very powerful. Language does not just describe reality. Language creates the reality it describes.

Christ] is the Mediator, not only between God and man, but between man and man, between man and reality.

God does not love some ideal person, but rather human beings just as we are, not some ideal world, but rather the real world.

The world is not divided between Christ and the devil; it is completely the world of Christ, whether it recognizes this or not. As this reality in Christ it is to be addressed, and thus the false reality that it imagines itself to have, in itself or in the devil, is to be destroyed. The dark, evil world may not be surrendered to the devil, but must be claimed for the one who won it by coming in the flesh, by the death and resurrection of Christ.

Christian community is not an ideal we have to realize, but rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate. The more clearly we learn to recognize that the ground and strength and promise of all our community is in Jesus Christ alone, the more calmly we will learn to think about our community and pray and hope for it.

Since God, however, as ultimate reality is no other than the self-announcing, self-witnessing, self-revealing God in Jesus Christ, the question of good can only find its answer in Christ.

In Christ we are invited to participate in the reality of God and the reality of the world at the same time, the one not without the other.

I think that even in this place we ought to live as if we had no wishes and no future, and just be our true selves.

The source of a Christian ethic is not the reality of one's own self, not the reality of the world, nor is it the reality of norms and values. It is the reality of God that is revealed in Jesus Christ.

The attempt to understand reality apart from that action of God in and upon reality means living in anabstraction; it means failing to live in reality and vacillating between the extremes of a servile attitude toward the status quo and a protest in principle against it. Only God's becoming human makes possible an action that is genuinely in accord with reality. The world remains world. But it only does so because God has taken care of it and declared it to be under God's rule.

The wise man is the one who sees reality as it is, and who sees into the depths of things. That is why only that man is wise who sees reality in God. To understand reality is not the same as to know about outward events. It is to perceive the essential nature of things. The best-informed man is not necessarily the wisest. Indeed there is a danger that precisely in the multiplicity of his knowledge he will lose sight of what is essential.

Since the appearance of Christ, ethics can be concerned with only one thing: to partake in the reality of the fulfilled will of God.