23+ Leland Ryken Quotes On Biblical, Literary And Analysis

Leland Ryken is a professor of English at Wheaton College, where he has taught since 1968. He is a renowned expert on the Bible and literature, having written and edited more than 50 books on the subject. He is also a frequent speaker and lecturer on the topics of literature, the Bible, and Christian education. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Leland Ryken on love, life, leadership.

Top 10 Leland Ryken Quotes

1. A Christian philosophy of literature begins with the same agenda of issues that any philosophy of literature addresses. Its distinctive feature is that it relates these issues to the Christian faith.
2. The Puritans' sense of priorities in life was one of their greatest strengths. Putting God first and valuing everything else in relation to God was a recurrent Puritan theme.
3. In Puritan thinking, the Christian life was a heroic venture, requiring a full quota of energy.
4. William Perkins said, “The end of a man’s calling is not to gather riches for himself…but to serve God in the serving of man, and in the seeking the good of all men.
5. No group of people has been more unjustly maligned in the twentieth century than the Puritans. As a result, we approach the Puritans with an enormous baggage of culturally ingrained prejudice.
6. The goal of Bible translation is: be transparent to the original text - to see as clearly as possible what the biblical authors actually wrote.
7. The secularization of Western culture was accompanied by the elevation of art to the position of a substitute religion to replace Christianity.
8. Stressing the God-centered life can lead to an otherworldly withdrawal from everyday earthly life.
9. For the Puritans, the God-centered life meant making the quest for spiritual and moral holiness the great business of life.
10. When you think about Puritanism, you must begin by getting rid of the slang term 'Puritanism' as applied to Victorian religious hypocrisy. This does not apply to seventeenth-century Puritanism.

Leland Ryken Short Quotes

• The Puritans were obsessed with the dangers of wealth.
• Puritanism was a youthful, vigorous movement.
• Since God is the one who calls people to their work, the worker becomes a steward who serves God.

Leland Ryken Famous Quotes And Sayings

The oldest theory of art belongs to the Greeks, who regarded art as an imitation (mimesis) of reality. The strength of that theory is that it explains the way in which art takes its materials from real life. — Leland Ryken

Readers should aspire to what is excellent. They should refuse to read a substitute Bible. They should want a Bible that calls them to their higher selves - or to something higher than their current level of attainment. — Leland Ryken

Literature takes reality and human experience as its starting point, transforms it by means of the imagination, and sends readers back to life with renewed understanding of it and zest for it because of their excursions into a purely imaginary realm. — Leland Ryken

There is a quiet revolution going on in the study of the Bible. At its center is a growing awareness that the Bible is a work of literature and that the methods of literary scholarship are a necessary part of any complete study of the Bible. — Leland Ryken

Literature incarnates its meanings as concretely as possible. The knowledge that literature gives of a subject is the kind of knowledge that is obtained by (vicariously) living through an experience. — Leland Ryken

My claim is simply that the literary approach is one necessary way to read and interpret the Bible, an approach that has been unjustifiably neglected. Despite that neglect, the literary approach builds at every turn on what biblical scholars have done to recover the original, intended meaning of the biblical text. — Leland Ryken

Writers themselves benefit from all helpful information about their task and methods. Readers, in turn, can have both their understanding and appreciation of literature enhanced by information about the writer's work. — Leland Ryken

The Bible is obviously a mixed book. Literary and nonliterary (expository, explanatory) writing exist side by side within the covers of this unique book. — Leland Ryken

The Puritans removed organs and paintings from churches, but bought them for private use in their homes. — Leland Ryken

With so many contradictory renditions of the biblical text, the public has lost confidence that we can actually know what the Bible says. It is an easy step from this skepticism to an indifference about what the Bible says. — Leland Ryken

Life Lessons by Leland Ryken

1. Leland Ryken's work emphasizes the importance of understanding the original context of a passage in order to properly interpret it.
2. He also stresses the importance of reading the Bible as a unified whole, rather than isolating individual passages.
3. Finally, Ryken's work emphasizes the need for readers to be aware of the literary conventions and devices used in the Bible in order to properly interpret it.