Quotes About Belief

Under the impact of the modern world, there has been a definite melting down of the assurance of faith. Secularization makes the Christian faith seem less real, privatization makes it seem merely a private preference, and pluralization makes it seem just one among many.

When cultures reject God, they cut themselves off from the ultimate ground of reality

what matters for each of us is the adequacy and truth of what we come to believe is the meaning of life—and therefore the source from which we derive our sense of identity, purpose, ethics and community.

In a world congenial to skepticism, skeptics love to play the skeptic's card nonchalantly as if it were the royal flush that trumped all other cards and could not be countered. For many, it has become the skeptics' way of hanging out a "Do Not Disturb" sign. Simply raise a skeptical objection and retire from all argument. But of course, the simplest response is to turn such skepticism back on itself.

Christian advocacy always goes wrong when we become the focus of our efforts, rather than the Lord. For when we are the focus, we subtly come to believe that God is no more certain than our defense of him. Argue and defend God well, and the world of faith appears unshakable. Defend him badly, and doubts creep in or crash down on top of us.

There is no question that the Four Spiritual Laws have been remarkably fruitful as a way of evangelism, but they are not good for everyone.

Religion was once life's central mystery, its worship life's most awesome experience, its beliefs life's broadest canopy of meaning as well as its deepest guarantee of belonging. Yet today, where religion still survives in the modern world, no matter how passionate or committed the believer, it amounts to little more than a private preference, a spare-time hobby, and a leisure pursuit.

Erudition lends conviction to self-deception.

Thinking Christians think in believing and they believe in thinking.

Don't trust anyone over thirty," the 1960s radicals cried. "Don't trust anyone under three hundred," came Thomas Oden's wise reply.

If ours is an examined faith, we should be unafraid to doubt. If doubt is eventually justified, we were believing what clearly was not worth believing. But if doubt is answered, our faith has grown stronger. It knows God more certainly and it can enjoy God more deeply.

Man's love of truth is such that when he loves something which is not the truth, he pretends to himself that what he loves is the truth, and because he hates to be proved wrong, he will not allow himself to be convinced that he is deceiving himself. So he hates the real truth for what he takes to his heart in its place.

For anyone who understands freedom, it is simply inescapable that freedom requires truth, a shared sense of truth, and therefore trustworthiness and trust.

As Pascal wrote long ago, "Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.

Something has surely gone terribly wrong when Christians are the best atheist arguments against the Christian faith and Christendom their best argument for atheism.

all human desires, longings and aspirations point beyond themselves and toward God. The full range and depth of our desires are simply not fully covered by our unbelieving faiths and philosophies; and therefore they are not fully satisfied by what our unbelieving minds insist is true.

Either we may seek to conform our desires to the truth, which leads to conviction, or we may seek to conform the truth to our desires, which leads to evasion.

If we truly know why we trust God—and that crucial if must be answered with full intellectual and spiritual assurance—if we truly know why we trust God, then God is greater than all, and God may be trusted in all situations, despite everyone and everything.

we Christians must show again that we are both people of the Word and people who believe in words. Words are never mere words for us

The truth of the faith does not stand and fall with our defense of it.

For any follower of Jesus Christ who follows this path on the quest for meaning, the statement is true: A Christian thinks in believing and believes in thinking.

You can judge a culture by what it talks about and what it refuses to talk about, and talk of "spiritual warfare" would be a useful litmus test today.

Again, the heart of apologetics is the apologetics of the heart.

Christians," as that crusty old philosopher Bertrand Russell used to quip, "would sooner die than think—in fact they do.