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41 " All culture, whatever significance it may have, just as all education, civilization, development, is absolutely powerless to renew the inner man. "
― Herman Bavinck , Philosophy of Revelation
42 " Thus the true, the good and the beautiful which ethical culture seeks can only come to perfection when the absolute good is at the same time the almighty, divine will, which not only prescribes the good in the moral law, but also works it effectually in man himself. The heteronomy of law and the autonomy of man are reconciled only by this theonomy. "
43 " everything we value in this life is inseparably connected with the future. "
44 " religious experience is neither the source nor the foundation of religious truth; "
45 " All worldviews, therefore, end in an eschatology and all efforts at reformation are animated by faith in the future. "
46 " faith, which forms its positive side is at the same time cognitio and fiducia, a trustful knowledge and a knowing trust. "
47 " either humanity, with all its culture, is a means for the unconscious, unreasonable, and purposeless world-power, or it is a means for the glorifying of God. "
48 " Ethical culture must be a philosophy of revelation or it cannot exist. "
49 " God makes everything beautiful in His time, He makes everything happen at the right moment, at the moment He has fixed for it, so that history in its entirety and in its parts corresponds to the counsel of God and exhibits the glory of that counsel. "
― Herman Bavinck , The Wonderful Works of God
50 " the subduing of the earth, that is, the whole of culture, is given to him, and can be given to him only because he is created after God's image; man can be ruler of the earth only because and in so far as he is a servant, a son of God. "
51 " Of the existence of self, of the world round us, of logical and moral law, ect., we are so deeply convinced because of the indelible impressions which all these things make upon our consciousness that we need no arguments or demonstration. Spontaneously, altogether involuntarily: without any constraint or coercion, we accept that existence. Now the same is true in regard to the existence of God. The so-called proofs are by no means the final grounds of our most certain conviction that God exits. This certainty is established only by faith: that is, by spontaneous testimony which forces itself upon us from every side. "
― Herman Bavinck , The Doctrine of God
52 " Revelation in nature and revelation in Scripture form, in alliance with each other, a harmonious unity which satisfies the requirements of the intellect and the needs of the heart alike. "
53 " 173Augustine speaks of a Christianity which has existed since the beginning of the human race, "
54 " reason was cast down from this exalted pedestal by the philosophy of Kant, by the theology of Schleiermacher and with the rise of the Romantic school. "
55 " Culture in the broadest sense includes all the labor which human power expends on nature. "
56 " this nature is twofold; it includes not only the whole visible world of phenomena which is outside man, but also, in a wider sense, man himself; not his body alone, but his soul also. "
57 " God’s will is the will of the Creator of heaven and earth, who cannot repudiate his own work in creation or providence, and who cannot treat the human being he has created as though it were a stock or stone. It is the will of a merciful and kind Father, who never forces things with brute violence, but successfully counters all our resistance by the spiritual might of love. The will of God realizes itself in no other way than through our reason and our will. That is why it is rightly said that a person, by the grace he receives, himself believes and himself terms from sin to God. "
58 " Philosophy arose out of religion, "
59 " God’s will is the will of the Creator of heaven and earth, who cannot repudiate his own work in creation or providence, and who cannot treat the human being he has created as though it were a stock or stone. It is the will of a merciful and kind Father, who never forces things with brute violence, but successfully counters all our resistance by the spiritual might of love. The will of God realizes itself in no other way than through our reason and our will. That is why it is rightly said that a person, by the grace he receives, himself believes and himself turns from sin to God. "
60 " What history gives us leaves upon us, on the contrary, the impression of decadence rather than of an advancing civilization. "