Quotes About Faith

Cuanto más sencilla era la explicación, más fácil resultaba creerla. —El

Books are never harmless...they either strengthen us or they weaken us in our faith. Some of them do this even as they entertain us, others as they teach us. In an invisible way their teaching penetrates into our hearts and souls, to continue its work inside, and we inhale the spirit of these books as healing or poisonous vapors. They can bring the greatest benefits and the greatest ruin, for from their ideas that they spread come the deeds of the future.

Peter Robinson

If you were to live your life like a prayer, every action a sort of prayer, it would be easy to believe that all your thoughts were the words of God. Perhaps they would be.

Todos mis problemas surgen de creer cosas que sé que no son ciertas.

The incoming of God as expressed in the incarnation represents a beautiful expression of this simultaneous revealing and withdrawal, for in the Incarnation the mystery of God is not dissipated but rather deepened. The mystery is not unmasked, but rather dwells with us, in our midst. The mystery is thus not overcome in the Incarnation but rather encountered there.

our religious beliefs have not provided us what they seemed to promise.

As the psychologist Victor Frankl once pointed out, true knowledge is always knowledge plus – that is, knowledge that understands that it is always penetrated by unknowing. The result is that God is not defined as the greatest conceivable being or as that which is greater than conception, but rather, as Anselm argued, God is the one who is conceived as inconceivable.

For, if we shift our focus, it is possible to see that these ripples and ruptures within the text, far from counting against the work as something divinely inspired, are exactly what we would expect to find from that which is marked by and born out of the very depths of God.

The sheer amount of ideological conflicts playing out within the text hints at the fact that the writers were writing about a reality that could not be reduced to one description, a reality that was testified to better in the clash of perspectives than in the development of a single, finely honed one. The text was written not to be approached as an academic document detailing facts about the life of faith but rather as an invitation into the life of faith.

What if Jesus was not offering his followers an ethical system to follow, but rather was inviting them to enter into a life of love that transcends ethics, a life of liberty that dwells beyond religious laws?

it can be said that God is not seen but is testified to in a particular way of seeing. Previously we saw how the Idol is experienced as existing, until we grasp it and discover that it doesn't. Here God is felt not to exist, and yet by this act of calling everything into existence it seems that the moment we stop trying to grasp God the existence of God is indirectly testified to in the existence of everything we encounter.

approaching the truth affirmed by Christianity as some abstract, objective assertion to be tested, simply demonstrates that the questioner is approaching this query as a problem to be pondered, dissected, and solved, rather than a mystery to inhabit and be transformed by.

God as love expresses the idea that the sacred is not found in a distant object toward which we focus our love, but rather is testified to in the act of loving itself. Faith, then, is not a set of beliefs about the world. It is rather found in the loving embrace of the world.

The event testified to within Christianity is evident in a life that has been freed from an idolatrous existence that turns us from the world to an iconic engagement with the world.

we witness the idea that faith is born from an event that is so luminous we are left dazzled by its incoming—an event so deep that we are saturated by it, so vast that we are dwarfed by it, and so bright that we are blinded by it.

What we think and say about God is still both important and unavoidable, for our words help us come to terms with the hallowed mystery and respond to it. However, this approach diligently maintains a conceptual distance between ourselves and God, one which approaches the divine mystery as something to be transformed by rather than solved.

In contrast to the modern view that religious doubt is something to reject, fear or merely tolerate, doubt not only can be seen as an inevitable aspect of our humanity but also can be celebrated as a vital part of faith. Doubt has often been disparaged, or merely tolerated, because it is seen as leading to an inert state of undecidability in which nothing can be believed or acted upon. Yet in reality it is only in the midst of undecidability that real decisions can be made.

You are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither high church nor low church, Catholic nor Protestant, citizen nor alien, capitalist nor communist, gay nor straight, beautiful nor ugly, East nor West, theist nor atheist, Israel nor Palestine, American nor Iraqi, married nor divorced, uptown nor downtown, terrorist nor freedom fighter, for all are made one in Christ Jesus.

Christianity is not brain surgery or rocket science, it is not quantum mechanics or nuclear physics; it is both infinitely easier and more difficult than all of these. The fragile flame of faith is fanned into life so simply: all we need do is sit still for a few moments, embrace the silence that engulfs us, and invite that flame to burn bright within us.

It is in stillness, in the silence, that the word of God is to be heard.

As a human being I am always haunted by doubt as to questions concerning God. However, I cannot deny that something has transformed my life and that I love the source of that transformation with all of my heart.

For Christians it is a happening, an event, that we affirm and respond to, regardless of the ebbs and flows of our abstract theological reflections concerning the source and nature of this happening.

The affirmation of an intervention amidst all our doubt and uncertainty concerning its source thus represents the Christian idea that we have been marked by a life-giving event that invites us to passionately respond with our entire being. It is out of this that a deep and sustained questioning arises.