Joseph Sittler Quotes

• A believer is an evangelist primarily by who he is and how he lives-not by what he says. What he says is important; but unless his speaking tallies with what he is and does, he had better keep quiet.

  Joseph Sittler

  Important, Doe, Quiet

  Joseph Sittler, Steven Bouma-Prediger, Peter W. Bakken (2000). “Evocations of Grace: The Writings of Joseph Sittler on Ecology, Theology, and Ethics”, p.202, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

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• I do not believe that our relationship to the earth is liable to change for the better until it gets catastrophically worse. Our record indicates that we can walk with our eyes wide open straight into sheer destruction if there is a profit on the way-and that seems to me to be what we are doing now. I have no great expectation that human cussedness will somehow be quickly modified and turned into generosity or that humanity's care of the earth will improve much. But I do go around planting trees on the campus.

  Joseph Sittler

  Believe, Eye, Generosity

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• Augustine said that we were all born into the world of "common grace" [i.e., available to all]. Before one is baptized, or even if one never is, such grace meets one in God's creation. There is grace in the pear tree that blooms and blushes. There is common grace in the sea (that massive cleanliness which we are proceeding to corrupt), in the fact that there was, before we laid hands on it, clean air. Our task is to appreciate that grace.

  Joseph Sittler

  Sea, Air, Hands

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• I have never been able to entertain a God-idea which was not integrally related to the fact of chipmunks, squirrels, hippopotamuses, galaxies, and light years.

  Joseph Sittler

  Squirrels, Light, Years

  Joseph Sittler, Steven Bouma-Prediger, Peter W. Bakken (2000). “Evocations of Grace: The Writings of Joseph Sittler on Ecology, Theology, and Ethics”, p.77, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

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• On the first page of the Bible there is an instance of how literalism is but an invitation to transcend the image to which literalism points. That first page is not geology, biology or paleontology; it is high religion. For there we are told who we are in terms of our constititutive text. And if we could understand that, we would worrying about whether the antelopes or the cantaloupes came in a certain order.

  Joseph Sittler

  Order, Worry, Firsts

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• God is not identified with the world, for he made it; but God is not separate from His world, either. For He made it.

  Joseph Sittler

  World, Creation, Made

  Joseph Sittler (1998). “The Structure of Christian Ethics”, p.4, Westminster John Knox Press

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