D. A. Carson Quotes

The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief - call it what you will - than any book ever written. It has emptied more churches than all the counter-attractions of cinema, motor bicycle and golf course.

If we are perplexed by an apparent contradiction in Scripture, it is not allowable to say, 'The author of this book is mistaken'; but either the manuscript is faulty, or the translation is wrong, or you have not understood.

It's not the parts of the Bible I don't know that worries me...it's the parts that I do.

I've often thought the Bible should have a disclaimer in the front saying, 'This is fiction.'

I believe the fast track to atheism is reading the Bible. I've read it three times all the way through. It's a big part of our culture, a big part of our history. I don't just read things I agree with.

My earlier views of the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation and the human origin of the scriptures, have become clearer and stronger with advancing years and I see no reason for thinking I shall ever change them.

Happily I had very early learned the fallacy of building much on logic and verbal argument. Single sets of truths I knew to be as little conclusive in theology as in physics; and, in one as in the other, no theory to be worth anything, however plausibly backed up with Scripture texts or facts, which was not gathered bona fide from the analysis of all the attainable phenomena, and verified wherever possible by experiment.

There must be no inventing or recounting to the people of new things … uncanonical and according to their own taste rather than the Holy Scriptures.

I'm trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief.

Subtract from the New Testament the miraculous and highly impossible, and what will be the remainder?

Let us read the Bible without the ill-fitting colored spectacles of theology, just as we read other books, using our own judgment and reason, listening to the voice within, not to the noisy babel without. Most of us possess discriminating reasoning powers. Can we use them or must we be fed by others like babes?

So many things were testing his faith. There was the Bible, of course, but the Bible was a book, and so were Bleak House, Treasure Island, Ethan Frome and The Last of the Mohicans. Did it then seem probable, as he had once overheard Dunbar ask, that the answers to riddles of creation would be supplied by people too ignorant to understand the mechanics of rainfall? Had Almighty God, in all His infinite wisdom, really been afraid that men six thousand years ago would succeed in building a tower to heaven?

I've grown up in a generation that questions God for setting boundaries. Does He have the right to set boundaries? I've grown up in a generation that thinks where meeting with a God is an ordinary thing.

If we cannot find our way to a time when most of us are willing to admit that, at the very least, we are not sure whether or not God wrote some of our books, then we need only count the days to Armageddon-because God has given us far many more reasons to kill one another than to turn the other cheek.

Don't take our word for it. Read the Bible itself. Read the statements of preachers. And you will understand that God is the most desperate character, the worst villain in all fiction.

What does God need with a starship?

I am much less interested in what is called God's word than in God's deeds. All bibles are man-made.

To me, these biblical stories are just so many fish stories, and I'm not specifically referring to Jonah and the whale. I need indisputable proof of anything I'm asked to believe.

...the Bible is such a book of lies and contradictions there is no knowing which part to believe or whether any.

The New Testament is a commentary on the Old Testament, in the light of the new revelation given by Christ and the Holy Spirit.

In all cases, the Church is to be judged by the Scripture, not the Scripture by the Church.

A simple man with Scripture has more authority than the Pope or a council.

Where the Scriptures speak, we speak; where the Scriptures are silent, we are silent.

We must be compelled to hold this doctrine to be false, and the old and new law called the Old and New Testament, to be impositions, fables and forgeries.

I do not know, sir, that the fellow is an infidel; but if he be an infidel, he is an infidel as a dog is an infidel; that is to say, he has never thought upon the subject.