Zwingli had considered the word of God to be the privileged medium precisely because it made no appeal (in his view) to the sensuous domain of the body as constructed by sight. "Why," he asked rhetorically, "do we not send images to unbelievers so that they can learn belief from them?" Why indeed, Sallman's publishers may well have asked, for they supplied a global market with images of Jesus, which church groups and religious organizations sent around the world during World War II and after. Yet, to take Zwingli's point, which was, in effect, substantially expanded and explored by Roland Barthes: the message of the photographic image is imbricated with the textual codes of discourse, which connote something other than what we see. But we naturalize the codes by taking the image to signify them. This operation of connotation or imbrication is not limited to the photograph, however. Sallman's imagery naturalizes what his viewers think or have been told to think, and it is able to do so in no small way because of the massive dissemination of his work. People often see it and have continually seen it since childhood in so many places that it acquires a kind of de facto normative stature. As many people say, it's what Jesus looks like.

—David Morgan, Icons of American Protestantism: The Art of Warner Sallman

The statue, Zerchi was dismayed to notice, bore a marked similarity to some of the most effeminate images by which mediocre, or worse than mediocre, artists had traditionally misrepresented the personality of Christ. The sweet-sick face, blank eyes, simpering lips, and arms spread wide in a gesture of embrace. The hips were broad as a woman's, and the chest hinted at breasts—unless those were only folds in the cloak. Dear Lord of Golgotha, Abbot Zerchi breathed, is that all the rabble imagine You to be? He could with effort imagine the statue saying: "Suffer the little children to come unto me," but he could not imagine it saying: "Depart from me into everlasting fire, accursed ones," or flogging the money-changers out of the temple.

—Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz

The condition of a fish's life, its environment, is water; take a fish out of water, and it dies. The condition of a tree's life, its health and its environment, is the soil: uproot a tree, and you kill it. It is no act of liberation to take a fish out of water, or a tree out of the ground. Similarly, the condition of a man's life, the ground of man's moral, spiritual, and physical health, is the law of God. To take men and societies out of the world of God's law is to sentence them to a decline, fall, and death. Instead of liberation, it is execution. Man's liberty is under God's law, and God's law is the life-giving air of man and society, the basic condition of their existence.

—R. J. Rushdoony, Law and Liberty

It was not well enough for the faithful, in those days, to depend upon the word of God, and to engage in those ceremonial services which he required, unless, aided by external symbols, they elevated their minds above these, and yielded to God spiritual worship. God, indeed, gave real tokens of his presence in that visible sanctuary, but not for the purpose of binding the senses and thoughts of his people to earthly elements; he wished rather that these external symbols should serve as ladders, by which the faithful might ascend even to heaven.

—John  Calvin, quoted in David Taylor ed., For the Beauty of the Church

"New morality" follows the situation ethics set forth popularly by Joseph Fletcher. Fletcher summarized his view of ethics by saying, "We must always do what love requires in the situation." This maxim, if it stood alone, would be sound. We are always responsible to do what love demands in a situation. Love is the linchpin of the law of God. The problem remains how to know what love requires in a given situation. God's law reveals what God's love requires.

When Paul speaks of the ethics of love, he says, "And live a life of love, just as Christ loved us..." (Eph. 5:2). But the apostle does not stop with an ambiguous appeal to love. In the next breath he says, "But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God's holy people" (Eph. 5:3). Here the law of God defines what is consistent with love. Appeals to love are frequently used to excuse sin. The oldest ploy in the world for sexual seduction is, "If you love me, you will." Yet Paul declares, "If you love God, you won't. Ever."

—R. C. Sproul, Playing God

Besides, that article seems a bit indecent and childish; that notion of gambling, of losses and winnings, does not suit the gravity of the subject.

—Voltaire, Philosophical Letters, discussing Pascal's famous wager on the existence of God

"But is it not the deepest Law of nature that she remain constant?" cries an illuminated class: "Is not the machine of the universe fixed to move by unalterable rules?" Probable enough, good friends; nay, I too must believe that the God, whom ancient, inspired men assert to be "without variableness or shadow of turning," does indeed never change; that Nature, that the Universe, which no one whom it so pleases can be prevented from calling a Machine, does move by the most unalterable rules. And now of you too I make the old inquiry: What those same unalterable rules, forming the complete Status-Book of Nature, may possibly be?

They stand written in our Works of Science, say you; in the accumulated records of man's Experience?—Was man with his Experience present at the Creation, then, to see how it all went on? Have any deepest scientific individuals yet dived down to the foundation of the Universe, and gauged every thing there? Did the Maker take them into his counsel; that they read His ground-plan of the incomprehensible All; and can say, This stands marked therein, and no more than this? Alas, not in anywise! These scientific individuals have been nowhere but where we also are; have seen some handbreadths deeper than we see into the Deep that is infinite, without bottom as without shore.

—Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

The God of Scripture redeems men for His Kingdom and His Holy and eternal purposes, not to give men peace of mind and a ticket to heaven.

—R. J. Rushdoony, To Be as God

All that science can show us is the how of God's creation; never can we by scientific means disprove the fact of it, still less cast light on the why.

—Roger Scruton, On Hunting

In order to discover the rules of association that are most suitable to nations, a superior intelligence would be necessary who could see all the passions of men without experiencing any one of them; who would have no affinity with our nature and yet know it thoroughly; whose happiness would not depend on us, and who would nevertheless be quite willing to interest himself in ours; and, lastly, one who, storing up for himself with  the progress of time a far-off glory in the future, could labor in one age and enjoy in another. Gods would be necessary to give laws to men.

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract

Liszt was unanimously adopted as speaker. When the first toast was called, he rose and in the name of the whole company addressed me for a full quarter of an hour with a warmth of feeling, a wealth of ideas and a turn of phrase that many orators would envy. I was deeply touched. Unhappily, if he spoke well, he drank likewise. The fatal cup set such tides of champagne flowing that all Liszt's eloquence was shipwrecked in it. Belloni and I were still reasoning with him in the street at two in the morning, and urging on him the advisability of waiting until daylight before engaging in single combat with pistols at two yards' range with a Bohemian who had drunk even better than he. When daylight came we felt somewhat anxious for Liszt, who was giving a concert at noon. At half-past eleven he was still asleep. They finally woke him; he climbed into a carriage, arrived at the hall, entered to a triple-barreled broadside of applause, sat down, and played as I do not believe he has ever played in his life. Verily, there is a God . . . for pianists.

—Hector Berlioz, Memoirs

The law of contradiction is not to be taken as an axiom prior to or independent of God. The law is God thinking.

—Gordon Clark, Logic

Knowing God without knowing our own wretchedness makes for pride. Knowing our own wretchedness without knowing God makes for despair. Knowing Jesus Christ strikes the balance because he shows us both God and our own wretchedness.

—Blaise Pascal, Thoughts

God's will has been to redeem men and open the way of salvation to those who seek it, but men have shown themselves so unworthy that it is right for God to refuse to some, for their hardness of heart, what he grants to others by a mercy they have not earned.

—Blaise Pascal, Thoughts

What sort of freak then is man! How novel, how monstrous, how chaotic, how paradoxical, how prodigious! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, repository of truth, sink of doubt and error, glory and refuse of the universe! Know then, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself. Be humble, impotent reason! Be silent, feeble nature! Learn that man infinitely transcends man, hear from your master your true condition, which is unknown to you. Listen to God.

—Blaise Pascal, Thoughts

When God removes some particular thing from us and it becomes apparent through the event, which is evidence of God's will, that it is not his will that we should have the thing, it is then forbidden as much as sin, since it is God's will that we should not have one any more than the other. The only difference between these two things is that it is certain that God will never will sin, whereas it is not certain that he will never will the other thing. But, while God does not will it, we must regard it as sin, as long as God's will, sole source of good and right, is against it and makes it bad and wrong.

—Blaise Pascal, Thoughts

God is visible in his word and work. Apart from his word and work, one should not look for him.

—Martin Luther, quoted in Stephen J. Nichols, Martin Luther: A guided tour of his life and thought

God is not the bolsterer of our human wisdom, the buttress of our self-sufficiency. He is the despoiler of our human self-reliance.

—Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind

Many people first begin to approach the Christian Faith with a mental attitude wholly or largely secular in its operations. Thus a man may recognize a need to posit a God behind the universe because otherwise he finds the origin and purpose of life inexplicable. Having posited a God, he may go further and persuade himself that Jesus Christ comes nearest to representing what divinity must be like.

Tenuous intellectual admissions of this kind often no doubt lead to something solider and more nourishing. As they stand, they represent a state of mind far removed from the Christian. A God is posited because the brain likes it like that: it wants to dwell upon a cause as well as an effect, upon a purpose as well as an activity. In other words, the individual intellect summons up a God in order to satisfy its thirst for system and order. Man's intellect wants a complete picture of the shape and meaning of things, and it proves artistically desirable to insert a God in the top right-hand corner of the composition.

It is important not to denigrate the demands of the human intellect. The Christian believes that God has given us our reasoning powers: we haven't manufactured them ourselves. Nevertheless it is equally important not to miss the sharp distinction between an intellectual demand for a God to fill up a humanly composed picture, and the Christian's awakening to the fact of a divine revelation in time by which an institution, a book, a tradition are presented to him charged with the weight of an absolute and transcendent authority. A mere intellectual demand for a God to fill up the picture is essentially secularist in spirit and in motive, in that it claims a God only to enrich and complete a finite situation. but the Christian's awakening to the fact of divine revelation serves to shatter the apparent completeness of the finite and to impoverish human experience in so far as it has been confined by that delusive "completeness".

—Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind

You omnipotent good, you care for every one of us as if you cared only for that person, and so for all as if they were but one!

—Augustine, Confessions