James Luther Adams Quotes

We are not a religious tradition with a creed, but a religious movement that has always wedded social justice work to theology

An unexamined faith is not worth having, for it can be true only by accident.

The free person does not live by an unexamined faith. To do so is to worship an idol whittled out and made into a fetish.

The faith of a church or of a nation is an adequate faith only when it inspires and enables people to give of their time and energy to shape the various institutions - social, economic, and political - of the common life.

I call that church free which enters into the covenant with the ultimate source of existence. It binds together families and generations, protecting against the idolatry of any human claim to absolute truth or authority.

A good deal of so-called atheism is itself, from my point of view, theologically significant. It is the working of God in history, and judgement upon the pious. An authentic prophet can be a radical critic of spurious piety, of sham spirituality.

Religious liberalism affirms the moral obligation to direct one's effort toward the establishment of a just and *loving* community.

L]iberalism holds that the resources (divine and human) that are available for the achievement of meaningful change justify an attitude of ultimate optimism

Nothing is complete and thus nothing is exempt from criticism.

Everyone is a theologian, either conscious or unconscious, in the sense that everyone has some conception of the nature of reality, of the demands of reality, and of those elements in reality that support or threaten meaningful existence.

Church is a place where you get to practice what it means to be human.