9 Quotes by Jaroslav Pelikan

Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And, I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name.

If Christ is risen, nothing else matters. And if Christ is not risen-nothing else matters.

Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.

Tradition is the living faith of dead people to which we must add our chapter while we have the gift of life. Traditionalism is the dead faith of living people who fear that if anything changes, the whole enterprise will crumble.

The only alternative to tradition is bad tradition.

The church is always more than a school. But the church cannot be less than a school.

Jesus Christ is too important to be left to the theologians.

An agnostic position is one that leaves open the question whether there exists a god or gods, professing to find such a question unanswered or unanswerable. For the atheist, the question has been answered, and in the negative.

Unlike most readers in Antiquity who read their books aloud, we have developed the convention of reading silently. This lets us read more widely but often less well, especially when what we are reading – such as the plays of Shakespeare and Holy Scripture – is a body of oral material that has been, almost but not quite accidentally, captured in a book like a fly in amber.