Quotes from H. Richard Niebuhr

Everyone has some kind of philosophy, some general worldview, which to men of other views will seem mythological.

A God without wrath brought human beings without sin into a kingdom without judgment through ministrations of a Christ without a cross.

The great Christian revolutions came not by the discovery of something that was not known before. They happen when someone takes radically something that was always there.

Religion makes good people better and bad people worse.

Christendom has often achieved apparent success by ignoring the precepts of its founder.

Men are generally right in what they affirm and wrong in what they deny. What we deny is generally something that lies outside our experience, and about which we can therefore say nothing.

Religion makes good people better and bad people worse.

Men are generally right in what they affirm and wrong in what they deny. What we deny is generally something that lies outside our experience, and about which we can therefore say nothing.

It is imperative that the past of the pilgrims' progress be intentionally carried forward into the present as we work into our future. Without it we cannot know who we are, why we are here, or where we can go. Without a common past to live out of we become aimless and wandering individuals instead of a pilgrim people.

Everyone has some kind of philosophy, some general worldview, which to men of other views will seem mythological.

Nothing is as evanescent in history as the pansophic theories that flourish among the illuminati of all times under the bright sunlight of the latest scientific discoveries; and nothing can be more easily dismissed by later periods as mere speculation.