110+ D. A. Carson Quotes On Drifting, Scholarly And Exegetical

D. A. Carson is a Canadian theologian and New Testament scholar. He is the co-founder of the Gospel Coalition and has written or edited more than 50 books. He is a professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois. Following is our collection on famous quotes by D. A. Carson on drifting, scholarly, exegetical.

Top 10 D. A. Carson Quotes

1. All of us would be wiser if we would resolve never to put people down, except on our prayer lists.
2. Effective prayer is the fruit of a relationship with God, not a technique for acquiring blessings.
3. Many of us in our praying are like nasty little boys who ring front door bells and run away before anyone answers.
4. The way to be anxious about nothing is to be prayerful about everything.
5. Hell is not filled with people who are deeply sorry for their sins. It is filled with people who for all eternity still shake their puny fist in the face of God Almighty.
6. True freedom is not the liberty to do anything we please, but the liberty to do what we ought; and it is genuine liberty because doing what we ought now pleases us
7. Either worrying drives out prayer, or prayer drives out worrying.
8. It was not nails that held Jesus to that wretched cross; it was his unqualified resolution, out of love for his Father, to do his Father's will-and it was his love for sinners like me.
9. Effectiveness in teaching the Bible is purchased at the price of much study, some of it lonely, all of it tiring.
10. Worship is the proper response of all moral, sentient beings to God, ascribing all honor and worth to their Creator-God precisely because he is worthy, delightfully so.

D. A. Carson Short Quotes

• The heart of all idolatry in the Bible is the de-godding of God.
• A text without a context is a pretext for a proof text.
• The New Testament writers did not invent a doctrine of Scripture they inherited it.
• Sin corrupts even our good deeds. We injure our shoulder trying to pat ourselves on the back.
• It is a cheap zeal that reserves its passions to combat only the sins and temptations of others.
• The more we get to know God, the more we want to know him better.
• Damn all false dichotomies to hell
• Sex is about timing. The world says: any time, any place. God says: my time, my place.
• We are lost when human opinion means more to us than God’s.
• Our prayers may be an index of how small and self-centered our world is.

D. A. Carson Famous Quotes And Sayings

The cliché, God hates the sin but love the sinner, is false on the face of it and should be abandoned. Fourteen times in the first fifty Psalms alone, we are told that God hates the sinner, His wrath is on the liar, and so forth. In the Bible, the wrath of God rests both on the sin (Romans 1:18ff) and on the sinner (John 3:36). — D. A. Carson

What binds us together is not common education, common race, common income levels, common politics, common nationality, common accents, common jobs, or anything else of that sort. Christians come together because they have all been loved by Jesus himself. They are a band of natural enemies who love one another for Jesus' sake. — D. A. Carson

The Bible is endlessly interesting because it is God's story, and God by nature is himself endlessly interesting. The Bible is an ever-flowing fountain. The more you read it, the more you find its truth and beauty to be inexhaustible. — D. A. Carson

The person who loves his life will lose it: it could not be otherwise, for to love one's life is a fundamental denial of God's sovereignty, of God's rights, and a brazen elevation of self to the apogee of one's perception, and therefore an idolatrous focus on self, which is the heart of all sin — D. A. Carson

Despite the protestations, one sometimes wonders if we are beginning to worship, worship rather than worship God. — D. A. Carson

To worship God 'in spirit and in truth' is first and foremost a way of saying that we must worship God by means of Christ. In him the reality has dawned and the shadows are being swept away (Hebrews 8:13). Christian worship is new covenant worship; it is gospel-inspired worship; it is Christ-centered worship; it is cross-focused worship. — D. A. Carson

The Bible does not tell us that life in this world will be fair. Evil and sin are not Victorian gentlemen; they do not play fair. — D. A. Carson

Imagination is a God-given gift; but if it is fed dirt by the eye, it will be dirty. All sin, not least sexual sin, begins with the imagination. Therefore what feeds the imagination is of maximum importance in the pursuit of kingdom righteousness. — D. A. Carson

In any Christian view of life, self-fulfillment must never be permitted to become the controlling issue. The issue is service, the service of real people. The question is, 'How can I be most useful?', not, 'How can I feel most useful?' — D. A. Carson

Christians have learned that when there seems to be no other evidence of God's love, they cannot escape the cross. — D. A. Carson

Both God's love and God's wrath are ratcheted up in the move from the old covenant to the new, from the Old Testament to the New. These themes barrel along through redemptive history, unresolved, until they come to a resounding climax - in the cross. — D. A. Carson

We overcome the accuser of our brothers and sisters, we overcome our consciences, we overcome our bad tempers, we overcome our defeats, we overcome our lusts, we overcome our fears, we overcome our pettiness on the basis of the blood of the Lamb. — D. A. Carson

You cannot find excellent corporate worship until you stop trying to find excellent corporate worship and pursue God himself. — D. A. Carson

Damn all false antitheses to hell, for they generate false gods, they perpetuate idols, they twist and distort our souls, they launch the church into violent pendulum swings who oscillations succeed only in dividing brothers and sisters in Christ — D. A. Carson

Do you wish to see God's love? Look at the cross. Do you wish to see God's wrath? Look at the cross. — D. A. Carson

Sin defies God, utterly corrupts each individual, corrodes all social relationships, and issues in death. — D. A. Carson

What the Bible says is what God has disclosed and we want to approach this sacred text with cognitive reverence. — D. A. Carson

Draw nigh to God, so that you may dread the grave as little as your bed. Draw nigh to God, that you may live a happy and useful life. Drawing nigh to God is the most concentrated energy of the soul. Effective prayer is the fruit of a relationship with God, not a technique for acquiring blessings. — D. A. Carson

The kingdom of heaven is worth infinitely more than the cost of discipleship, and those who know where the treasure lies joyfully abandon everything else to secure it. — D. A. Carson

There is no long-range effective teaching of the Bible that is not accompanied by long hours of ongoing study of the Bible. — D. A. Carson

Justice is not always done in this world; we see that everyday. But on the Last Day it will be done for all to see. And no one will be able to complain by saying, "This isn't fair." — D. A. Carson

It's not a matter of us standing outside it and ticking off the boxes: yes, the Bible is faithful here; yes, it's telling the truth there, and so on, but rather granted that it's God-given. It's the frame of reference that shows us how to live in, tells us how to think about everything. — D. A. Carson

If it is hard to accept a rebuke, even a private one, it is harder still to administer one in loving humility. — D. A. Carson

Study Bibles tend to circulate widely, so they play a disproportionate role in helping Christians and others understand holy Scripture. Further, many of our members have long used one or two other Study Bibles, and it is important that Christians not be tied too tightly to only one option, however good it may be. — D. A. Carson

The truth of the matter is that inerrancy is simply a way of saying that there are no errors that call into question the truthfulness of Scripture wherever Scripture is making truth claims. — D. A. Carson

One cannot fail to observe a crushing irony: the gospel of relativistic tolerance is perhaps the most “evangelistic” movement in Western culture at the moment, demanding assent and brooking no rivals. — D. A. Carson

To God on whom we rely knows what suffering is all about- not merely in the way that God knows everything, but by experience. — D. A. Carson

The important thing, Jesus is saying (in Matthew 5:33-37), is to tell the truth and keep one's pledges without insisting that a certain form of words must be used if it is to be binding. No oath is necessary for the truthful person... Their word is so reliable that nothing more than a statement is needed from them. — D. A. Carson

Failure to believe stems from moral failure to recognize the truth, not from want of evidence, but from willful neglect or distortion of the evidence. — D. A. Carson

Christianity does not claim to convey merely religious truth, but truth about all reality. This vision of reality is radically different from a secularist vision that wants Christianity to scuttle into the corner of the hearth by the coal shovel, conveniently out of the way of anything but private religious concerns — D. A. Carson

The Bible is not interested in precisionism unless the context indicates that precision is particularly important. — D. A. Carson

The New Testament writers I think conceive of their inspired Scripture writings as flushing out, bringing to articulation, expounding and so on the climactic revelation in the son, but this in self-conscious fulfillment of the promises and covenants that were already made to God's chosen people in Old Testament times. — D. A. Carson

In every generation there are voices that question the authority of Scripture. So in one sense this is merely part of the continuing stream. But there's a sense in which the questions that are raised against Scripture vary a wee bit from generation to generation. — D. A. Carson

Systematic theology will ask questions like "What are the attributes of God? What is sin? What does the cross achieve?" Biblical theology tends to ask questions such as "What is the theology of the prophecy of Isaiah? What do we learn from John's Gospel? How does the theme of the temple work itself out across the entire Bible?" Both approaches are legitimate; both are important. They are mutually complementary. — D. A. Carson

You get into theological education and you're busy marking papers and getting into administration in raising funds and doing all the things that are part of life, but here we were talking about important theological, historical, gospel related, biblically centered things hour after hour after hour. — D. A. Carson

Good praying is more easily caught than taught. — D. A. Carson

Jesus is hungry but feeds others; He grows weary but offers others rest; He is the King Messiah but pays tribute; He is called the devil but casts out demons; He dies the death of a sinner but comes to save His people from their sins; He is sold for thirty pieces of silver but gives His life a ransom for many; He will not turn stones to bread for Himself but gives His own body as bread for people. — D. A. Carson

A weak understanding of what the Bible says about sin is tied to a weak understanding of what the Bible says is achieved by the cross. — D. A. Carson

When Christians speak of the authority of Scripture, because Christians believe that this word, even though it's mediated through many different human authors, nevertheless is God breathed and is revealed by God and is utterly reliable and all that it says, with all of its different literary genres, it's trustworthy and without mistake or distortion. It is trustworthy and therefore, because it is from God it has God's authority. — D. A. Carson

God has disclosed of himself in human words with such magnificent self accommodation to our limitations. Precisely so that we may be his holy people and reverence everything that he says, cherish it, value it, and thus live it out. — D. A. Carson

"Study Bible" is the expression used for Bibles that include significant explanatory notes, usually at the bottom of the page, sometimes in the margins. Often a Study Bible will also include some brief articles, photographs of geographical and archaeological sites, fairly extensive maps, and charts that summarize a lot of information. — D. A. Carson

A billion years or so into eternity, how many toys we accumulated during this life will not seem too terribly important. — D. A. Carson

Unchecked, the new tolerance will sooner or later put many people in chains. — D. A. Carson

Not all Scripture is propositional, some of it is asking questions, some of it's rhetorical, but where Scripture is stating something, asserting something, making a truth claim, uttering a proposition that is claiming to be true, it is the truth. — D. A. Carson

The truth of the matter is that all we have to do is live long enough and we will suffer. — D. A. Carson

Wrath, unlike love, is not one of the intrinsic perfections of God. Rather, it is a function of God's holiness against sin. Where there is no sin, there is no wrath-but there will always be love in God. Where God in His holiness confronts His image-bearers in their rebellion, there must be wrath, or God is not the jealous God He claims to be, and His holiness is impugned. The price of diluting God's wrath is diminishing God's holiness. — D. A. Carson

Some Christians want enough of Christ to be identified with him but not enough to be seriously inconvenienced. — D. A. Carson

There is no sense in which Mohammed is viewed as a writer. — D. A. Carson

So there are all kinds of things that grammarian purists would argue are awkward forms of speech and sometimes they are intentional for rhetorical effect and sometimes it's the way people chose to write at the time. Inerrancy isn't interested in any of those kinds of things. — D. A. Carson

I can say that it's 10 miles from my home to Trinity, when in fact that's not quite right, it's off by about 10%, but nobody would say that I'm telling a lie or making a mistake when I rounded off because that's the way we speak and rounded off terms regularly. — D. A. Carson

...sometimes God chooses to bless us and make us people of integrity in the midst of abominable circumstances, rather than change our circumstances. — D. A. Carson

The broader problem is that a great deal of popular preaching and teaching uses the bible as a pegboard on which to hang a fair bit of Christianized pop psychology or moralizing encouragement, with very little effort to teach the faithful, from the Bible, the massive doctrines of historic confessional Christianity. — D. A. Carson

I suspect that relatively few people will sit down and read 1250 pages [ of The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures.] all the way through from cover to cover. There may be some, but not everybody. But there are many, many, many different Christian, theological, pastoral, specialisms that are covered by one section or another of the book and this will become, therefore, a resource volume for many people. — D. A. Carson

When we suffer, there will sometimes be mystery... Will there also be faith? — D. A. Carson

To assume the gospel in one generation is to lose it in the next. — D. A. Carson

It's not as if the New Testament writers came along and said, "The culmination of Old Testament books is more books, New Testament books." In some ways they thought instead of the culmination of Old Testament books being Christ himself, the word incarnate as the opening verses of Hebrews 1 put it. In the past God spoke to the fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his son and the son is revelation. — D. A. Carson

We are dealing with God's thoughts: we are obligated to take the greatest pains to understand them truly and to explain them clearly. — D. A. Carson

Love the church because Jesus loves it. — D. A. Carson

We treat the Bible, not as if it's a magic book that has to be handled like a piece of abracadabra, make sure it's dusted, never put it on the floor, and things like that. — D. A. Carson

The Christian's whole desire, at its best and highest, is that Jesus Christ be praised. It is always a wretched bastardization of our goals when we want to win glory for ourselves instead of for him. — D. A. Carson

We do not drift into spiritual life or disciplined prayer. We will not grow in prayer unless we plan to pray. — D. A. Carson

The person who prays more in public than in private reveals that he is less interested in God's approval than in human praise. Not piety but a reputation for piety is his concern. — D. A. Carson

God's love in John 3:16 is not amazing because the world is so big, but because the world is so bad. — D. A. Carson

... the worst possible heritage to leave with children: high spiritual pretensions and low performance. — D. A. Carson

Some forms of absolutism are not bad; they may even be heroic. — D. A. Carson

The place where God has supremely destroyed all human arrogance and pretension is the cross. — D. A. Carson

A wrong understanding is interested in precisionism. That is it tries to say that the Bible can't be telling the truth if it says that Jesus was such and such a distance from some place or other and in fact the distance is off by 15% or something like that. There are all kinds of grounded figures and so forth. — D. A. Carson

Make a mistake in the interpretation of one of Shakespeare’s plays, falsely scan a piece of Spenserian verse, and there is unlikely to be an entailment of eternal consequence; but we cannot lightly accept a similar laxity in the interpretation of Scripture. We are dealing with God’s thoughts: we are obligated to take the greatest pains to understand them truly and to explain them clearly. — D. A. Carson

The more clearly we see sins horror, the more we shall treasure the cross. — D. A. Carson

For the far higher task of teaching fortitude and patience I was never fool enough to suppose myself qualified, nor have I anything to offer my readers except my conviction that when pain is to be borne, a little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all. — D. A. Carson

Most good evangelical Study Bibles have more in common than people sometimes realize. All of them are committed to explaining the Bible to lay readers. — D. A. Carson

When we suffer, there will sometimes be mystery. Will there also be faith? Yes, if our attention is focused more on the cross, and on the God of the cross, than on the suffering itself. — D. A. Carson

If you want to see what judgment looks like, go to the cross. If you want to see what love looks like, go to the cross. — D. A. Carson

Prayer is God's appointed means for appropriating the blessings that are ours in Christ Jesus. — D. A. Carson

A prayerless person is a disaster waiting to happen. — D. A. Carson

We want to fan the flames of Christians for whom inerrancy and the authority of Scripture are not mere shibboleths, but part of her life beat, part of the beating heart of what makes them tick. They revere Scripture, not because Scripture becomes an idol, but because it discloses God who is especially come after us in salvation and redemption through the person of his son, his cross, his resurrection, the full sweep of the gospel. — D. A. Carson

Ordinary Bibles often include cross-references and brief concordances; Study Bibles include much more, all bound up in one fat volume, so that readers can find a lot of useful explanation on each page without having to hunt through Bible dictionaries and commentaries and the like. — D. A. Carson

For example, the Bible does say this is a proposition, "There is no God." But of course the context of Psalm 14:1 enriches it a bit: "the fool has said in his heart, there is no God." So there are contextual constraints and when you finish putting in all the contextual constraints and sophisticated discussions of what inerrancy is and isn't. — D. A. Carson

How much would our churches be transformed if each of us made it a practice to thank God for others and then to tell those others what it is about them that we thank God for? — D. A. Carson

God is absolutely sovereign, but his sovereignty never mitigates human responsibility. — D. A. Carson

Authority can mean different things to different people. For example, some document or other may be authoritative for particular group even though it's not reliable. It's just that the group has accepted that document as authoritative for their group. And some documents are truthful and reliable but they are ignored, so they have no authority for that particular group. — D. A. Carson

There is a certain kind of maturity that can be attained only through the discipline of suffering. — D. A. Carson

If the text is God's Word, it is appropriate that we respond with reverence, a certain fear, a holy joy, a questing obedience. — D. A. Carson

The way you lose the gospel is not by denying it, but by assuming it. — D. A. Carson

Some have argued that the Christian notion of Scripture is not epistemologically sustainable. It's not philosophically possible with rigor to uphold the Christian understanding of Scripture. — D. A. Carson

Much praying is not done because we do not plan to pray. We do not drift into spiritual life; we do not drift into disciplined prayer. We will not grow in prayer unless we plan to pray. That means we must self-consciousl y set aside time to do nothing but pray. — D. A. Carson

At the end of the day, in brief summary: inerrancy is interested in the truthfulness of Scripture and it is a powerful way forcing people to think about that reliability that is God-given. — D. A. Carson

That God normally operates the universe consistently makes science possible; that he does not always do so ought to keep science humble. — D. A. Carson

The aim is never to become a master of the Word, but to be mastered by it. — D. A. Carson

The notion of the enduring authority focuses on the fact that some people think that notions like authority of Scripture's is passé, while others say that the present configuration of the doctrine of inerrancy is a late addition. And to both we want to say, No we're talking about the enduring authority of Scripture, grounded first and foremost in its relevatory status, something given by God and utterly reliable. — D. A. Carson

Life Lessons by D. A. Carson

1. D. A. Carson's work emphasizes the importance of understanding the Bible in its original context and language in order to accurately interpret and apply its teachings.
2. He also encourages believers to be humble in their approach to scripture, recognizing that it is ultimately God's word and not our own.
3. Through his writings, Carson encourages readers to be thoughtful and prayerful in their study of scripture, seeking to understand and apply its truths to their lives.