Popular quotes about Christianity! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 65
With an abstract idea it is possible to enter into a relation of formal knowledge, to become enthusiastic about it, and perhaps even to put it into practice; but it can never be followed in personal obedience. Christianity without the living Christ is inevitably Christianity without discipleship, and Christianity without discipleship is always Christianity without Christ.
Dietrich BonhoefferChristianity can be built around isolating ourselves from evildoers and sinners, creating a community of religious piety and moral purity. Thatโs the Christianity I grew up with. Christianity can also be built around joining with the broken sinners and evildoers of our world crying out to God, groaning for grace. Thatโs the Christianity I have fallen in love with.
Shane ClaiborneThe most devastating thing though that biology did to Christianity was the discovery of biological evolution. Now that we know that Adam and Eve never were real people the central myth of Christianity is destroyed. If there never was an Adam and Eve there never was an original sin. If there never was an original sin there is no need of salvation. If there is no need of salvation there is no need of a Savior. And I submit that puts Jesus, historical or otherwise, into the ranks of the unemployed. I think that evolution is absolutely the death knell of Christianity.
Frank ZindlerChristianity is not a patent medicine. Christianity claims to give an account of facts - to tell you what the real universe is like. Its account of the universe may be true, or it may not, and once the question is really before you, then your natural inquisitiveness must make you want to know the answer. If Christianity is untrue, then no honest man will want to believe it, however helpful it might be: if it is true, every honest man will want to believe it, even if it gives him no help at all.
C. S. LewisHe who begins by loving Christianity more than Truth, will proceed by loving his sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.
Samuel Taylor ColeridgeIn the last years, I've been reading the Eastern fathers, the older mystical writings, a rich, deep, and truly traditional Christianity which most Western Christians know almost nothing about. It is very mystical and prayer centered Christianity, with a strong social conscience.
Richard RohrA Christianity that does not have as its primary focus the deepening of passions for God is a false Christianity, no matter how zealously it seeks conversions or how forcefully it advocates righteous behavior.
J. D. GreearChristianity is not about learning how to live within the lines; Christianity is about the joy of coloring. The grace of God is preposterous enough to accept as beautiful a coloring that anyone else would reject as ugly. The grace of God sees beyond the scribbling to the heart of the scribbler - a scribbler who is similar to two thieves who hung on crosses on either side of Jesus. One of the two asked Jesus to please accept his scribbled and sloppy life into the kingdom of God and He did. Preposterous. And very good news for the rest of us scribblers.
Mike YaconelliChristianity has not conquered nationalism; the opposite has been the case nationalism has made Christianity its footstool.
Arthur KeithIn Islam, there is no priesthood and each person stands before God, like in the daily prayers, without an intermediary. That's in contrast to Christianity, where during the Eucharist, a priest has to officiate and the priest functions as a link - at least in Catholic Christianity - between the laity and God.
Seyyed Hossein NasrTrue practical Christianity (never let it be forgotten) consists in devoting the heart and life to God; in being supremely and habitually governed by a desire to know, and a disposition to fulfill his will, and in endeavoring under the influence of these motives to 'live to his glory.' Where these essential requisites are wanting, however amiable the character may be, however creditable and respectable among men, yet, as it possesses not the grand distinguishing essence, it must not be complimented with the name of Christianity.
William WilberforcePeople try to persuade us that the objections against Christianity spring from doubt. That is a complete misunderstanding. The objections against Christianity spring from insubordination, the dislike of obedience, rebellion against all authority. As a result, people have hitherto been beating the air in their struggle against objections, because they have fought intellectually with doubt instead of fighting morally with rebellion.
Soren KierkegaardIt is through Christianity that Judaism has really conquered the world. Christianity is the masterpiece of Judaism.
Ernest RenanThe emerging church movement has come to believe that the ultimate context of the spiritual aspirations of a follower of Jesus Christ is not Christianity but rather the kingdom of God. ... to believe that God is limited to it would be an attempt to manage God. If one holds that Christ is confined to Christianity, one has chosen a god that is not sovereign. Soren Kierkegaard argued that the moment one decides to become a Christian, one is liable to idolatry.
Samir SelmanovicMy faith in Christ is central to my life. My conversion from a pessimistic atheist lost in a world I didn't understand, to an optimistic believer in a universe created and sustained by a loving God is crucial to me. But following Christ does not mean following His followers. Christ is infinitely more important than Christianity and always will be, no matter what Christianity is, has been, or might become.
Anne RiceThe praise of a civilized world is justly due to Christianity;โwar, by the influence of the humane principles of that religion, has been stripped of half its horrors. The French renounce Christianity, and they relapse into barbarism;โwar resumes the same hideous and savage form which it wore in the ages of Gothic and Roman violence.
Alexander HamiltonI have not given it [synagogue] up. Christianity is the completion of the synagogue, for the synagogue was a promise, and Christianity is the fulfillment of that promise.
Israel ZolliThe bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is the crowning proof of Christianity. If the resurrection did not take place, then Christianity is a false religion. If it did take place, then Christ is God and the Christian faith is absolute truth.
Henry M. MorrisIt was not Christianity which freed the slave: Christianity accepted slavery; Christian ministers defended it; Christian merchants trafficked in human flesh and blood, and drew their profits from the unspeakable horrors of the middle passage. Christian slaveholders treated their slaves as they did the cattle in their fields: they worked them, scourged them, mated them , parted them, and sold them at will. Abolition came with the decline in religious belief, and largely through the efforts of those who were denounced as heretics.
Hypatia Bradlaugh BonnerKant's aim was to develop a religion within the boundaries of mere reason (that is, reason unaided by special empirical revelation) and then to ask about existing ecclesiastical faith (especially about Christianity, and the Lutheran Christianity of his time and place) how this revealed faith must be interpreted if it is to be reconciled with reason, and even seen as a wider (though morally optional) extension of a religion of reason.
Allen W. WoodYou can't go to church without praying ten or fifteen times for God to have mercy on you. You can't sing "Amazing Grace" without reminding yourself that the reason God's grace is amazing is it saves a wretch like you. This self-denigration stuff - Jesus died for my sins - is nothing but a guilt message. That's the thing we've got to get out from under. That's not Christianity. That's sort of fourth-century Christianity that got turned into doctrines and dogmas that we've never been able to escape.
John Shelby SpongEvery civil government is based upon some religion or philosophy of life. Education in a nation will propagate the religion of that nation. In America, the foundational religion was Christianity. And it was sown in the hearts of Americans through the home and private and public schools for centuries. Our liberty, growth, and prosperity was the result of a Biblical philosophy of life. Our continued freedom and success is dependent on our educating the youth of America in the principles of Christianity.
Noah WebsterEvangelical Christianity, as everyone knows, is founded upon hate, as the Christianity of Christ was founded upon love.
H. L. MenckenFor indeed Christianity was complicit in the death of antiquity, and in the birth of modernity, not because it was an accomplice of the latter, but because it, alone in the history of the West, constituted a rejection of and alternative to nihilism's despair, violence, and idolatry of power; as such, Christianity shattered the imposing and enchanting facade behind which nihilism once hid, and thereby, inadvertently, called it forth into the open.
David Bentley HartIt is often asserted that woman owes all the advantages of the position she occupies to-day to Christianity, but the facts of history show that the Christian Church has done nothing specifically for woman's elevation. In the general march of civilization, she has necessarily reaped the advantage of man's higher development, but we must not claim for Christianity all that has been achieved by science, discovery and invention.
Elizabeth Cady StantonI fear that much of the Christianity that surrounds us assumes our task is to save appearances by protecting God from Job-like anguish. But if God is the God of Jesus Christ, then God does not need our protection. What God demands is not protection, but truth.
Stanley HauerwasMany argue that Christianity is "different" from other religions - that it is primarily about love of one's fellow man. The Crusades, The Inquisition, Calvin's Geneva all prove that this is not the case. These events were pre-eminently about obedience to authority.
Andrew BernsteinI've often reflected on the rather obvious thought that when his disciples were about to have the world collapse in on them, our Lord spent so much time in the Upper Room speaking to them about the mystery of the Trinity. If anything could underline the necessity of Trinitarianism for practical Christianity, that must surely be it!
Sinclair B. FergusonThe truth is I've always been a Christian. What's amazing, is that the flaws that come with Christianity are really weird, because mine have a microphone and a camera attached to them. Most people don't have to live under that microscope.
Steve HarveyI talk about a Christianity that is enlightened enough to separate spirituality from the rest of life. Not just church and state, but knowledge and church.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali... in Northern Ireland, if you don't have basic Christianity, rather than merely religion, all you get out of the experience of living is bitterness.
Bernadette DevlinBecause Christianity is a religion of death, it could be treated with the utmost realism, and it could have its orgies, just likethe old religion of nature and life.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich SchlegelI am utterly struck how, 300 years after his execution, Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire.
Peter JenningsI think the Resurrection continues to be a pivotal issue, a pivotal question for people. I think a lot of other issues have been raised in interim years, about the nature of truth, of course gender issues, issues involving social matters like abortion and euthanasia and so forth, those swirl about and change from time to time, but I think the fundamental question of whether or not Christianity is true ultimately goes back to the Resurrection.
Lee StrobelEvery spiritual tradition has this idea of death and resurrection. It's not unique to Christianity.
Deepak ChopraThe sincere Christian knows that what died in Auschwitz was not the Jewish people but Christianity.
Elie WieselThe Mosaic religion had been a Father religion; Christianity became a Son religion. The old God, the Father, took second place; Christ, the Son, stood in His stead, just as in those dark times every son had longed to do.
Sigmund FreudThere are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions.
Gilbert K. ChestertonI consider Christianity to be one of the great disasters of the human race... It would be impossible to imagine anything more un - Christianlike than theology.
Alfred North WhiteheadThe battle against good and evil is raging now! Look at your television programming and movie advertisements presenting the occultโฆthe demonicโฆthe satanicโฆthe practice of witchcraft and sorcery in popular booksโฆthe open hostility toward Christianity and the revival of anti-Semitism. The fight is on for the hearts and minds of our children in ours homes, our schools, our universities, and our society.
John HageeChristianity is within a man, even as he is gifted with reason; it is associated with your mother's chair, and with the first remembered, tones of her blessed voice.
Samuel Taylor ColeridgeThere is a denial of the value of the individual. Christianity affirms the value of each individual soul. Nazism denies it. The individual is sacrificed to the idol of the German Leader, German State or the German race. The ordinary citizen is allowed to hear and think only as the rulers decree.
Clement AttleeWell, to be clear, I am a scholar of religions with four degrees, including one in the New Testament and fluency in Biblical Greek who has been studying the origins of Christianity for two decades who also happens to be Muslim.
Reza AslanMan has to create marriage because man is afraid of the unknown. On all levels of life and existence, man has created substitutes: for love there is marriage; for real religion there are sects - they are like marriages. Hinduism, Mohammedanism, Christianity, Jainism - they are not real religion. Real religion has no name; it is like love. But because love is dangerous and you are so afraid of the future, you would like to have some security. You believe more in insurance companies than in life. That's why you have created marriage.
Rajneesh