Quotes About Christian

It is time to change the paradigm of the church and of every Christian

Christian proclamation might make the gospel audible, but Christians living together in local congregations make the gospel visible (see John 13:34-35). The church is the gospel made visible.

Trace, the lengths you've gone to in taking care of us is nothing short of heroic. You are a blessed miracle from God, you and your men. You saved us and now you care for us. It's the Bible's very definition of a Christian.~ Deb

a dream half-waking, broken and uneasy, of the small gods of small places; gods of hills and woods and streams and crossways; the gods who still haunt their broken shrines, waiting in the dusk beyond the lights of the busy Christian churches, and the dogged rituals of the greater gods of Rome.

The recurring lovesickness of my teenage years often brought debilitating side effects, the worst of these being a compulsion to write Christian poetry. 

That's not the whole of it. As with many other faiths—including our own Christian one—a small group of zealots have distorted Islam to further their own agenda. When many women took to imitating the fashions of the Prophet's wives, some Moslem men saw an opportunity to put all women under their thumb. They espoused foul laws like those allowing a man to beat his wife or force her into his bed.

One can't even find the concept of the "immortal soul" in the Bible. It was grafted onto Christian teachings from the pagan Greeks long after the Bible was written.2

You can't just sashay into the jungle aiming to change it all over to the Christian style, without expecting the jungle to change you right back.

Many robins got in the church from the trees and roosted among the congregation. They were drunk from some berries and fallen persimmons. Come into the mead hall out of the chill. In Viking history, once a Christian described human life as the flight of a bird through the mead hall. The outerness afterward, eternity.

If all this sounds familiar to Christian readers, it should. This man—here, the emperor—is a god whose birthday is to be celebrated because it brought "good tidings" to the world; he is the greatest benefactor of humans, surpassing all others, and is to be considered a "savior." Jesus was not the only "savior-God" known to the ancient world.

The doctrine of the bodily resurrection of the dead at the end of time originated about two centuries before the life of Jesus, and by his day it had become a common feature of Jewish thought. Later, at the hands of Christians, it came to be transformed into a teaching of post-mortem rewards and punishments, the ideas of heaven and hell.

The problem is that most ancient people—whether Christian, Jewish, or pagan—did not have this paradigm. For them, the human realm was not an absolute category separated from the divine realm by an enormous and unbridgeable crevasse. On the contrary, the human and divine were two continuums that could, and did, overlap.

Thus, for Reimarus, the disciples started the Christian religion.

But the reality is that most of these symbols would have been quite simple for anyone at the time to discern, whether a devoted Christian or a Roman pagan.

Where do any of the ancient sources speak of a divine man who was crucified as an atonement for sin? So far as I know, there are no parallels to this central Christian claim.

The other Gospel that Origen mentions, the Gospel of Thomas, has been discovered in its entirety in modern times and is arguably the single most important Christian archaeological discovery of the twentieth century.

Later orthodox theologians would have found this view completely inadequate. In stressing that the Father was "greater" than the Son, Tertullian articulated a view that would later be deemed a heresy. Theology, in these early years of the formation of Christian doctrine, could not stand still. It progressed and got more complicated, sophisticated, and refined as time went on.

New Testament readers are frequently disappointed to find that the Christian Scriptures say little about the nature of the soul or its survival in an afterlife. Instead, church authorities base most of their teachings about the soul on Greek philosophy, particularly on the teachings of Socrates and Plato.

A Christian variation of the Greek hero myth infers that Jesus, like the celebrated figures of Dionysus, Orpheus, Heracles (Hercules), and Aeneas, descended (presumably after the Crucifixion) into these "dark pits," where he "made his proclamation to the imprisoned spirits" (1 Pet. 3: 19; cf. 1 Pet. 4: 6). After having experienced both earthly life and a postmortem descent to the Underworld, Jesus then ascends to the uppermost realm of the three-tier cosmos.

Every Christian has a capacity for the most magnificent Christlikeness. Yet, every Christian also has the potential to commit the most disgusting and horrible acts of the flesh.

If religion is about the sacred as opposed to the profane, the spirit as opposed to matter, the Creator as opposed to the created, Confucianism plainly does not qualify. But perhaps what we are to learn from this tradition is not that Confucianism is not a religion but that not all religious people parse the sacred and the secular the way Christians do.

Islamic civilization had a precocious scientific revolution, and for much of its history was more tolerant, cosmopolitan, and internally peaceful than the Christian West.

Always be ready to give a good testimony for the Lord, but remember that the best testimony a Christian can have is a love for others and good work habits.

The best practical advice I can give to the present generation is to practice the virtue which the Christians call love.