Quotes About Belief

The world does not need the church to talk about what is already possible. The work of the church is to battle the world's definition of what is believable and unbelievable.

The church will not have power to act or believe until it recovers its tradition of faith and permits that tradition to be the primal way out of enculturation. This is not a cry for traditionalism but rather a judgment that the church has no business more pressing than the reappropriation of its memory in its full power and authenticity.

Prayer is a refusal to settle for what is.

But this is real prayer, down and dirty. It is not nice church prayer that refuses to ask anything because we mostly do not believe that prayers are heard or answered.

The church will not have power to act or believe until it recovers its tradition of faith and permits that tradition to be the primal way out of enculturation.

every uncompromising ideology reduces faith to an idolatry

It is most unfortunate that, in the long history of the church, "faith" has been almost everywhere transubstantiated into "belief," which transposes the concrete practicality of trust into a cognitive enterprise. How ludicrous that in the long, oppressive history of orthodoxy—which guards cognitive formulations—that those who enforce right belief seem most often to be themselves unable or unwilling to engage in deep trust.

Cynicism always comes clothed in "realism". The alternatives to begin with an act of imagination. Can we imagine another way?

As every vibrant subcommunity knows, the defining prerequisite for such a subcommunity is a conviction that it can and will be different because of the purposes of God that will not relent.

we have believed that faith does not mean to acknowledge and embrace negativity.

Jesus astonishes his contemporaries by his capacity to see and act beyond conventional assumptions.

Thus the teaching of Jesus attests to the possibility of God that the world has long since taken to be impossible. That is what is wonderful about his teaching.

The old limits of the possible have been exposed as fraudulent inventions designed to keep the powerless in their places. Jesus violates such invented limitations and opens the world to the impossible. He ends that defiant declaration with the admonition: "And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me" (v. 23).

paraphrasing 1 Cor. 1:25) that the fictions of God are truer than the facts of men.13

The contemporary American church is so largely enculturated to the American ethos of consumerism that it has little power to believe or to act.

Observance of the freedom God has to change causes a terrible unsettling among the faithful.

It is rather the conviction that God will not quit until God has arrived at God's good intention.

Faith is both the conviction that justice can be accomplished and the refusal to accept injustice.

the Pentateuch really intended to teach faith and belief in God and his promise. Obedience to the law, then, was the natural evidence that one had really trusted the Lord and believed his promise.

To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest that we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion.

I felt that I had been driven from the temple where for nineteen years, along with other believers, I had worshiped the great god News on a daily basis.

We are *all* we are, and all in a sense we care to dream we are. And for that matter, anything outlandish, bizarre, is a godsend in this rather stodgy life. It is after all just what the old boy said – it's only the impossible that's credible; whatever credible may mean...

I believe in the devil, in the Powers of Darkness, Lawford, as firmly as I believe he and they are powerless – in the long run. They – what shall we say? - have surrendered their intrinsicality. You can just go through evil, as you can go through a sewer, and come out on the other side. A loathsome process too.

Science doesn't in the slightest depend on trust. It depends completely on the belief that you can demonstrate something for yourself.